-^3 



STUDIES IN NEW ENGLAND 
TRANSCENDENTALISM 



STUDIES IN NEW ENGLAND 
TRANSCENDENTALISM 



BY 



HAROLD CLARKE. GODDARD 



Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for 

the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Faculty 

of Philosophy, Columbia University 



NEW YORK 
1908 



V 






Copyright, 1908 
By The Columbia University Press 

Printed from type March, 1908 



PRESS OF 

The New Era Printinc company 
Lancaster, pa. 



The Monograph has been approved by the De- 
partment of English in Columbia University as a 
contribution to knowledge worthy of publication. 

A. H. THORNDIKE, 

Secretary. 



" TRANSCENDENTALISM "—AN INTRODUCTORY 
CHAPTER 

What was the nature of the transcendental movement in 
New England ? The critics can hardly be said to have reached 
a final answer to this question. There has been a good deal 
of innocent merriment. There has been a still larger amount 
of foolish scoffing and silly laughter — harmless, however, in the 
main. There have been knowing and indulgent smiles, telling, 
even better than condescending words, how deeply the pity 
of certain persons has been stirred at the sad vagaries of the 
transcendentalists. On the other hand there have been 
eulogies and esoteric utterances ; or, where words have failed, 
there has been a bowing of heads in silent veneration. Be- 
tween these two extremes, however, have appeared, fortunately, 
many saner and more critical estimates. But entire agree- 
ment, even here, has not by any means emerged ; and there 
seem to be some reasons for believing that the word transcen- 
dental is itself responsible for much of the confusion. 

The word transcendental, as applied to this movement, has 
been used in at least two distinct senses — one popular, the 
other more or less technically philosophical. The latter usage 
is to be traced of course to Kant and the Critique of Pure 
Reason. For a full understanding of the philosophical side 
of New England transcendentalism it is necessary to know 
somewhat of this technical meaning of transcendental ;* to have 
sojourned for a time in the kingdoms of the Transcendental 
Aesthetic, the Transcendental Analytic, and the Transcendental 
Dialectic; to have at least a bowing acquaintance with such 

1 " I call all knowledge transcendental which is occupied not so much 
with objects, as with our a priori concepts of objects. A system of such 
concepts might be called Transcendental Philosophy. . . . Transcendental 
Philosophy ... is a system of all principles of pure reason. . . . Tran- 
scendental philosophy is the wisdom of pure speculative reason." In- 
troduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (pp. 9, 11, 12, translation of 
F. Max Muller, Macmillan, 1896). 
2 1 



formidable inhabitants of these realms as the A Priori Synthetic 
Cognition and the Transcendental Ego of Apperception; to 
recognize, for instance, what Schelling means by a System 
of Transcendental Idealism; and to understand somewhat of 
the nature of the German and other transcendental seeds that 
Coleridge 1 sowed and tried to bring to flower in English soil. 
But fortunately for our present study, we may escape many 
of these difficulties that seemingly confront us ; nor shall we 
have to excuse ourselves by saying that these matters belong 
to the professional metaphysicians, reasonable, perhaps, as 
such a plea might be ; for the fact is that the question, What 
was the philosophy of the New England transcendentalists ? 
is about the least mooted point in the whole discussion, and, 
if this alone were the question to be answered, such an essay 
as the present one would hardly be in order. 

Transcendental, in its philosophical sense, was used in con- 
nection with this New England movement in a broad and often 
very elastic way; yet, after all, it had a quite definite and un- 
mistakable meaning, nor can that meaning be said to have 
undergone any development or change. Emerson, at the be- 
ginning of his lecture, The Transcend entalist, tells us plainly 
what that usage was : 

" It is well known to most of my audience, that the Idealism 
of the present day acquired the name Transcendental, from 
the use of that term by Immanuel Kant of Konigsberg, who 
replied to the sceptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted 
that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously 
in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a 
very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did 
not come by experience, but through which experience was 
acquired ; that these were intuitions of the mind itself ; and he 
denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary 
profoundness and precision of that man's thinking have given 
vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to that 
extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought 
is popularly called at the present day Transcendental?' 

1 See, e. g., " On the difference in kind of Reason and the Under- 
standing," Aids to Reflection (Complete Works, N. Y., 1858, vol. i, 241). 






Theodore Parker's lecture Transcendentalism is an extended 
amplification of the same definition, and shows, with especial 
clearness, how the term was then employed. 

Kant had taught that time and space are not external real- 
ities 1 or even concepts derived from external experience, 2 , but 
ways in which the mind " constitutes " its world of sense. In 
terms of the familiar illustration, they are the mental spectacles 
through which we look. Again, cause and effect, he says, 
and all the other " categories " are forms or methods in accord 
with which the mental content is arranged. The ideas of 
God, furthermore, of freedom, and of immortality, are in- 
evitable intuitions of the practical nature of man ; and these 
intuitions, since man is essentially a practical and moral being, 
have therefore not a merely sentimental but a real validity. 
Now from these and other Kantian conceptions a broad gen- 
eralization was made 3 (as the passage from Emerson just 
quoted renders clear), and the word transcendental came to 
be applied — by the New England transcendentalists and others 
— to whatever in man's mental and spiritual nature is con- 
ceived of as " above " experience and independent of it. What- 
ever transcends (sensational) experience is transcendental. 
Innate, original, universal, a priori, intuitive — these are words 
all of which convey a part of the thought swept under the 
larger meaning of the term. To the transcendentalists the 
name John Locke stood for the denial of innate ideas. " Sen- 

1 Critique of Pure Reason, 22 and 28 (tr. Miiller). 

2 Ibid., 18 and 24. 

3 A passage from the Introduction to the Critique (11) will show how 
much more restricted and technical Kant's use of the term was : " The 
most important consideration in the arrangement of such a science 
[the science of which Transcendental Philosophy is an idea] is that no 
concepts should be admitted which contain anything empirical, and that 
the a priori knowledge shall be perfectly pure. Therefore, although the 
highest principles of morality and their fundamental concepts are a 
priori knowledge, they do not belong to transcendental philosophy, be- 
cause the concepts of pleasure and pain, desire, inclination, free-will, 
etc., which are all of empirical origin, must here be presupposed. Tran- 
scendental philosophy is the wisdom of pure speculative reason. Every- 
thing practical, so far as it contains motives, has reference to senti- 
ments, and these belong to empirical sources of knowledge." 



sationalism " was the prevalent description of the doctrine of 
his Essay. Transcendentalism and sensationalism! — these 
were the poles of the philosophy of mind, and among the elect 
of the new movement to call a man a sensationalist was a 
polite way of informing him that he was an intellectual and 
spiritual dullard. 1 

Transcendentalism was, then, first and foremost-, a doctrine 
concerning the mind, its ways of acting and methods of getting 
knowledge. Upon this doctrine the New England transcen- 
dental philosophy as a whole was built. What the nature of 
that philosophy was, as has been said, is a matter of general 
agreement, and in setting down, briefly, its most important ele- 
ments one is certain only to be repeating what has been often 
and well said before. Of course on minor points there is 
still plenty of room for controversy. One may discuss end- 
lessly, for instance, how far Emerson's God was a personal 
being. It may be pointed out wherein in one respect Theodore 
Parker contradicts Bronson Alcott, or how in another Emerson 
differs from Margaret Fuller ; and indeed in this connection 
it should not be forgotten that these transcendentalists were 
variously adapted, by both nature and training, for pure meta- 
physical thinking. But after everything has been said, there 
remains no possible doubt that in its large outlines they all 
held an identical philosophy. This philosophy teaches the 
unity of the world in God and the immanence of God in the 
world. Because of this indwelling of divinity, every part of 
the world, however small, is a microcosm, comprehending 
within itself, like Tennyson's flower in the crannied wall, all 
the laws and meaning of existence. The soul of each indi- 
vidual is identical with the soul of the world, and contains, 
latently, all which it contains. The normal life of man is a 
life of continuous expansion, the making actual of the potential 
elements of his being. This may occur in two ways : either 
directly, in states which vary from the ordinary perception 
of truth to moments of mystical rapture in which there is a 
conscious influx of the divine into the human ; or indirectly, 
through the instrumentality of nature. Nature is the em- 

1 See Emerson's words quoted below, p. 71. 



bodiment of spirit in the world of sense — it is a great picture 
to be appreciated ; a great book to be read ; a great task to be 
performed. Through the beauty, truth, and goodness incar- 
nate in the natural world, the individual soul comes in contact 
with and appropriates to itself the spirit and being of God. 
From these beliefs as a center radiate all those others, which, 
however differently emphasized and variously blended, are con- 
stantly met with among the transcendentalists, as, for example, 
the doctrine of self-reliance and individualism, the identity of 
moral and physical laws, the essential unity of all religions, 
complete tolerance, the negative nature of evil, absolute 
optimism, a disregard for all " external " authority and for 
tradition, even, indeed, some conceptions not wholly typical of 
New England transcendentalism, like Alcott's doctrine of crea- 
tion by " lapse." i But always, beneath the rest, is the funda- 
mental belief in the identity of the individual soul with God, 
and — at the same time the source and the corollary of this 
belief — an unshakable faith in the divine authority of the intui- 
tions of the. soul. Insight, instinct, impulse, intuition — the 
trust of the transcendentalists in these was complete, and 
whenever they employ these words they must be understood 
not in the ordinary but in a highly technical sense. Through 
a failure to observe this point, and on the supposition that 
the word " instinct " — in the phrase " Trust your instincts " — 
has its usual meaning, scores of persons have completely mis- 
understood and grossly misrepresented the teaching of Emer- 
son and his associates. 1 Intuition — that is the method of the 
transcendental philosophy; no truth worth the knowing is 
susceptible of logical demonstration. 2 Herein is seen the pre- 
dominance, in the Kantian influence on this movement, of the 
Critique of Practical over the Critique of Pure Reason? 

1 See for further- comment on this point, p, 142. 

3 " Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not 
wish to hear, ' How do you know it is truth, and not an error of 
your own ? ' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we 
know when we are awake that we are awake." Emerson, Works, ii, 262. 

3 It is worthy of note that that part of the Critique of Pure Reason 
which teaches the impossibility of the mind's knowing external things 
as they really are and the futility of metaphysical speculation finds no 



No one seems to know just how or just when the term 
transcendentalists was first applied to Emerson and his circle; 
but there is evidence that those on whom it was bestowed were 
not overwhelmed with gratitude at the gift. 1 What was the 
reason for the resentment? Surely these men were far enough 
from being ashamed of a kinship with Kant and Kant's 
" idealist " successors. That there was a degree of such re- 
sentment, however, seems certain, and so we are compelled to 
suspect that the term — if indeed it were not maliciously applied 
in the beginning — very early took on somewhat of that popular 
significance which has clung to it ever since. With this 
second meaning, completely to be distinguished from the philo- 
sophical one we have been considering, transcendental has 
been used as practically synonymous with " transcending 
common-sense," airy, flighty, " ideal " in the uncomplimentary 
sense of that word. It may be objected at once that this 
second use is merely a colloquial, satirical perversion of the 
term. 2 Whatever it may be, this is the meaning that has 
been most widely attached to it ; it is the meaning that the 
word conveys to the majority of readers today. The critic of 
transcendentalism will reckon ill who leaves it out. 

There are other reasons besides its wide prevalence that 
entitle this popular use of the word to consideration. In the 
first place it embodies the most frequent and serious charge 
that has been brought against the New England transcen- 

reflection in the New England use of transcendental. It troubled these 
men as little as it did Kant's " idealist " successors in Germany. As 
an example of the way in which the Critique of Practical Reason ap- 
pealed especially to the transcendentalists, see the words of Theodore 
Parker, quoted below, p. 89. 

1 See Dial, ii, 382. 

2 The transcendentalists themselves used the term in both senses. For 
example, compare Theodore Parker's words from his Journal (1840), 
" I intend, in the coming year, to let out all the force of Transcendental- 
ism that is in me" (Weiss, i, 155), and this extract from another of 
his sentences : " You remember the stuff which Margaret Fuller used to 
twaddle forth on that theme [the absence of art in America], and what 
transcendental nonsense got delivered from gawky girls and long-haired 
young men" (Weiss, ii, 377; the whole passage is given below, p. 165). 
And Emerson makes a similar distinction, see p. 166 sq. 



dentalists : that they were " lost in the clouds," out of touch 
with real, practical life, and out of joint with common-sense. 
In the second place a mere glance is sufficient to show that 
the actual history of the times does much to explain and some- 
thing to sanction the popular application of the word. During 
the same years when Emerson was writing and lecturing, 
when Theodore Parker was preaching, and Margaret Fuller 
was editing the Did, currents of religious and social unrest, 
some of them of the wildest types, were pulsing through 
New England. " Dissent " and " reform " — these were the 
watchwords of the hour ; and every " cause," from the maddest 
and the most insignificant to such mighty questions as those of 
temperance and anti-slavery, was given its hearing. Listen 
to Emerson's description of the members of the Chardon Street 
Convention who gathered in Boston in November, 1840-: 
" Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggle- 
tonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Bap- 
tists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Phi- 
losophers." 1 Surely these were wild and " transcendental " 
times ! 

Now all the radical tendencies of that day may be considered, 
perhaps, as parts of a single movement, and even the extremes, 
as we look back, may seem to blend quite imperceptibly to- 
gether. But the point is that if we glibly call the whole tran- 
scendentalism, we shall certainly be meaning something very 
different from what we mean when we speak of the transcen- 
dentalism of Emerson or Parker. No one can dictate how 
the term shall finally be used, but we shall inevitably fall into 
great confusion if we employ it in several senses, or if he who 
criticizes means one thing while he who reads may understand 
another. The significance often given to Brook Farm in 
discussions of this movement is an illustration of just this 
confusion. That Brook Farm was very typical of the times 
doubtless no one will deny; but transcendental in the more 
narrowly philosophical sense of the term it certainly was not 

1 Works, x, 351. See also the opening paragraphs of Lowell's essay on 
Thoreau ; and Cooke, 92. 



8 

— as indeed its latest historian clearly recognizes. 1 It was an 
attempt at collectivism, contrasting very markedly with the 
extreme individualism of a more strictly interpreted transcen- 
dentalism. Said Emerson, when George Ripley invited him to 
take part in the enterprise : " At the name of a society all my 
repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen." And it is 
worthy of remark that not one of the four whom common 
consent seems to have selected as the leading transcendentalists, 
Alcott, Emerson, Parker, and Margaret Fuller, had any active 
share in the enterprise, and that most of them, while sym- 
pathizing with the spirit of its founders, expressed themselves 
as disagreeing with the theories underlying it. 2 Indeed Mr. 
Lindsay Swift has put it in a way which cannot be improved 
on when he says that Emerson " never refers to Brook Farm 
without conveying to the finest sense the assurance that some- 
one is laughing behind the shrubbery." 

This is but one illustration of the confusion caused by the 
word transcendental. When we speak of the Elizabethan Age, 
of the Restoration Drama, of the Victorian Poets, we use terms 
purely or mainly temporal in their significance. But when we 
speak of the Transcendental Movement, we go further, we 
indulge in criticism in the very name ; and this is likely to 
prove dangerous, for we are tempted, if not compelled, to 
assume at the beginning what really should be the outcome 
of our discussion — a definition of transcendentalism. Well 
may we take warning from the more famous parallel case of 
romantic and the Romantic Movement! 

We wish, therefore, instead of starting with a definition of 
transcendentalism, to impose on ourselves a limitation of 
another sort, to confine our study almost exclusively to those 

1 " Brook Farm was a Transcendental movement without doubt, but 
only, after all, in that it was a speculation of pure idealists, and that its 
inspiration came from the sources here so imperfectly outlined." Lind- 
say Swift, Brook Farm, n. The same view is taken by Frothingham 
in his life of Ripley, 119. 

2 See Emerson's Works, iii, 251; x, 331; xii, 44 and 99; Holmes, 165 
and 191 ; Frothingham, George Ripley, 307. Weiss, i, 108. Memoirs, 
ii, 73. Chadwick, William Ellery Channing, 322. Sanborn, 382 ; notice 
that this last is not in Alcott's own words. 



whom, as we have just said, common consent has selected as 
the leaders of this movement. In other words we would re- 
strict not the meaning of the term but the field to be examined ; 
and if, for instance, Brook Farm is almost completely excluded 
from our pages, it will not be because of any abstract difference 
between individualism and collectivism, but because of the 
concrete fact that Alcott, Emerson, Parker, and Margaret 
Fuller had little hand in the experiment. Let it be clearly 
understood, then, that in the following studies transcenden- 
talism is being treated in this restricted sense, and the dis- 
cussion will center accordingly around the four chief names 
already mentioned. 1 

Within the realm, thus limited, of transcendental criticism, 
there are, we think, two questions in particular that must be 
looked on as distinctly " open." 

As has been said, there is little dispute as to what the New 
England transcendental philosophy was; but as to just whence 
it came, just what its various sources truly were, no answer 
really definite has been given. Concerning certain general 
points in the inquiry, there can, to be sure, exist no serious 
doubt or difference of opinion. But among proposed solutions 
of the problem there is still, in even important respects, wide 
divergence, and the final word in the matter has not by any 
means been spoken. The object of the second chapter of 
these studies is to examine the evidence on this point, as far 
as the leading transcendentalists are concerned. 

1 The passing of time has made the name of Henry David Thoreau of 
greater significance than that of any of the other transcendentalists 
except Emerson, and it may seem strange, therefore, that his name 
should not be included among those singled out for special treatment. 
But the fact that -Thoreau was much younger than the four others we 
have mentioned, and that the transcendental movement was already 
beyond its formative stage at a time when he was still hardly more 
than a boy, make him at once of far less importance than the others in 
connection with any investigation of the sources of the movement ; 
while to those parts of our discussion on which the date of his birth 
has a less vital bearing, the relation of Thoreau is so unmistakably clear 
that it has been found possible to summarize the facts in a brief para- 
graph of the concluding chapter. 

For the reasons for the attention given to William Ellery Channing, 
see p. 27 sq. 



10 

The second of the open questions is this : How far justified, 
as applied to the leaders of this movement, is the popular 
definition of transcendental, " transcending common-sense " ? 
This seems in many ways the very crux of transcendental 
criticism. Surely in the past it has been the chief bone of 
critical contention. The third and fourth chapters of the pres- 
ent essay are devoted to a consideration of this question. In 
the former, especially, some of the grounds of the popular 
criticism are examined. In the latter, the main point at issue 
is directly treated. 

For the purpose of throwing light on these discussions and 
of affording a slight historical setting, the first chapter is given 
to a short summary of the streams of tendency, American and 
foreign, leading toward the transcendental movement, and to 
an enumeration — in the briefest form — of some of the most 
important events of the transcendental period itself. It is 
designed especially to make clear the relation between Uni- 
tarianism and transcendentalism. As a complete study of 
these early currents of influence w T ould amount to little less than 
a history of the entire political, philosophical, and religious 
thought of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it 
will be sufficiently apparent that what is offered here is merely 
the most fragmentary summary. Obviously this inquiry is 
ultimately bound up with the question of the sources of tran- 
scendentalism ; indeed the two are in a way identical. But 
a distinction has been preserved — just wherein, the parts of 
the essay devoted to these subjects should make clear — be- 
tween forces only indirectly and those directly influencing the 
transcendental group. Several statements made in the course 
of Chapter I depend for their proof, it is true, upon the facts 
of Chapter II. Anticipated conclusions of this sort will be 
indicated in the footnotes. 

A glance at the chief books bearing on New England tran- 
scendentalism will be sufficient to show in what sense the two 
main questions proposed for discussion are still " open." 

The most important general work is O. B. Frothingham's 
Transcendentalism in New England, a History, a work of 
permanent value, founded on sympathetic insight, and showing 



11 

wide personal knowledge of the men and conditions treated. 
Even its unsupported statements have much of the weight of 
original authority. Its method, however, is largely expository 
and biographical, and while the book contains not a little that 
concerns the two questions we have singled out, its author 
cannot be said to have treated either of them except incidentally, 
much less to have gathered the evidence together. Indeed, 
in his opening paragraph, he distinctly disclaims any attempt 
to study in detail the sources of the movement. 

There are various accounts of Brook Farm, the best being 
Mr. Lindsay Swift's excellent little history. But since we have 
chosen to restrict our study to men who were only remotely 
connected with this enterprise, these books can have little 
bearing on the points of our discussion. 

For the rest, the most important works are the biographies 
of the transcendentalists, and it is to these, it is needless to 
say, that the writer is principally indebted for his facts. They 
differ much in the attention they give to the two specific 
inquiries we have raised. Mr. Higginson's admirable life of 
Margaret Fuller, for instance, seems to have been written 
with very especial reference to our second question ; while in 
the case of Emerson of course both of the problems have been 
pretty fully considered. But for the most part the points are 
treated incidentally, the pertinent facts being scattered through 
many pages ; and even though these matters had been handled 
exhaustively in every case, it is quite conceivable that the 
individual results might take on an entirely new meaning when 
considered collectively. The chapters on transcendentalism in 
these various biographies, while full of suggestive points of 
view (and to these the writer is deeply indebted, more deeply 
doubtless than he is himself aware), are in their very nature 
too brief for any massing of the evidence. The same may be 
said of the almost endless number of essays and magazine 
articles that have treated various phases of the subject. 

These observations are made in order to justify the present 
study ; and if it supplies material for answers to the two main 
questions that have been proposed, it is hoped that it will serve 
a useful purpose, whether or not the reader feels that the data 



12 

warrant the induction of the brief concluding chapter. If, 
however, that conclusion does seem to follow from the facts, 
unity is then given to the two parts of the discussion, and its 
scope is considerably widened. The chapters may, in that 
case, be regarded from a slightly different point of view. 
Some critics have looked upon transcendentalism as simply a 
New England importation from abroad; others have found in 
it a strictly indigenous product. In its extreme form either 
of these opinions is easy to refute, but the thought underlying 
them supplies an interesting and highly suggestive way of 
treating the whole matter. Under this aspect and in the light 
of the conclusion, the essay falls into three main parts, and a 
fourth part summing up the other three, somewhat as follows : 
I. A brief study of blended American and European in- 
fluences leading toward New England transcenden- 
talism. (Chapter I.) 
\ II. A study of the immediate European contribution to tran- 
scendentalism. 

(a) As shown in the reading and studies of these men. 

(Chapter II.) 

(b) As shown in the finished transcendental product. 

(Chapter III.) 1 

III. A study of the immediate American contribution to 

transcendentalism. (Chapter IV.) 

IV. Summary of I, II, and III, and general conclusion. 

(Chapter V.) 

1 Chapter III incidentally shows some aspects of the immediate 
American contribution. 



CHAPTER I 
Unitarianism and Transcendentalism 

The eighteenth century, we have often heard, was an age 
of prose and reason. The phrase is certainly a useful one, 
useful and illuminating; but we must be on our guard against 
too simple a formula for a period of extraordinary complexity. 
The eighteenth century was an age of transition ; it gathered 
up and criticized the life of Europe since the Renaissance ; it 
made ready, too, for the Europe that was to come. It was, 
in a peculiar sense, a meeting ground of the future and the 
past, a time, as Leslie Stephen has well put it, of compromise 
and truce. Such an age, manifestly, must refuse to be 
crowded into a pigeon-hole or to be embodied in a phrase. It 
was, for instance, not merely an era of prose and reason, but, 
as has often been pointed out, an era of the rebirth of emotion. 
Even in its earliest decades signs were not absent of a re- 
kindling enthusiasm ; and more and more, as its years went 
by, imagination and poetry, spirituality and the sense of mys- 
tery, reawakened from torpor into a new life. The age of 
rationalism and the age of the return of feeling — while even 
this description is far from exhausting the nature of the time, 
the contrast which these two aspects of the century present, 
becomes, for the purposes of our study, highly significant. 

For a long time the intellectual 1 and emotional currents of 
the eighteenth century flowed on with little or no blending of 
their streams, and neither of them, alone, it is clear, was ade- 
quate to bring the nineteenth century. The intellectual tend- 
ency was not adequate : the spirit of reason and criticism 
accomplished no transient nor despicable results, yet the logical 
end of the century's most radical, and it may be said, most 
progressive thought, was, as it took the genius of a Hume to 

1 Those " intellectual " currents especially are meant which time has 
shown were really potential with great results. 

13 



14 

perceive, the abyss of skepticism ; rationalism concluded, not 
unfittingly, its salutary reign — by digging its own grave. 
Here then, plainly, we have no sufficient explanation of the 
early nineteenth century with its intensity of life and action, 
its rich fruition of fresh ideals and faiths. Nor on the other 
hand is the new age to be fully accounted for by the emotional 
tendency of the preceding one: it, alone, could bring only a 
blind extravagance, a mawkish sentimentality, or a piety which, 
however beautiful, fixed its face resolutely on the past; the 
Richardsons, the Whitefields, and the Ossians were in no final 
sense the forerunners of the coming era. 

Skepticism and sentimentalism — these, then, were the two 
gulfs that seemed to await the intellectual and emotional cur- 
rents of the eighteenth century. But the age was destined 
to another end ; for once let these isolated streams of influence 
come together, once let this feeling and progressive thought 
unite, and instantly — whether positive or negative — a power 
was abroad in the land, a Rousseau, a Lessing, or a Tom Paine. 
Reason had germinated in the congenial soil of common- 
sense, but the seed could be saved from skeptical decay and 
death only as it forced its way up into the atmosphere of 
feeling. And this union of thought and feeling was, indeed, 
exactly what was taking place on all sides at the beginning 
of the revolutionary 1 era. Everywhere ideas were catching 
fire ; everywhere theories were being infused with the red 
blood of life. Pale abstractions, touched with passion, took on, 
in a moment, a strange vitality ; weak sentiment, fastening 
upon thought, assumed a sudden power. Out of this ferment 
of emotions and ideas, profound changes at the very heart of 
European life could scarcely fail to come. Far enough from 
revolutionary in temper was the author of the Essay on the 
Human Understanding, or the little English printer whose 
novels made the whole of Europe weep ; yet — we might almost 
say — Locke plus Richardson gives us Rousseau. 

It is customary to regard the new era as a revolt from the 

1 This term, throughout the discussion, it need hardly be said, is used 
with reference to the whole period of change at the end of the century, 
with no limited application to the French Revolution. 



15 

old. And so it was. But it was also its positive culmination. 
Indeed, as the scene shifts, it sometimes seems wellnigh im- 
possible to tell whether the figures that we now behold have 
come to inter the dead bones of the passing age, or whether in 
these figures we see those very bones themselves, risen, re- 
clothed in a new flesh and blood. If Wordsworth came to 
bury Pope's couplets, he came too to raise his pantheism from 
the dead. 1 

Again and again it is possible to point out thoughts of the 
late eighteenth or of the nineteenth century which — as mere 
thoughts — seem hardly distinguishable from those of a hun- 
dred or a hundred and fifty years before ; but the spirit in 
which they are held and the implications they involve differ 
often as widely as the poles. It is a far cry from the social 
contract of Hobbes, or even of Locke, to the social contract of 
Rousseau ; from the pantheism of Spinoza to the pantheism 
of Schelling, or from that of the Essay on Man to that of 
Adonais; from Pope's " Whatever is, is right " to Browning's 
" God's in his heaven — All's right with the world ! " But the 
analogies are not merely fanciful. And so, during the great 
epoch of change of which we speak, we have a curiously ironic 
spectacle : we behold men repudiating the age that is passing, 
yet, not infrequently, accepting its thought and transforming 
its Cold intellectual propositions into their own revolutionary 
watchwords. The touch of feeling on eighteenth century 
thinking wrought a result scarcely less astonishing than the 
famous contact of Ithuriel's spear. Indeed, we might apply 
Milton's figure, in at least one case, in further detail. The 
orthodox would have been far from unwilling to compare 
early English deism with a toad, and the seeming half-hearted- 
ness of its apostles, in the age of prose and reason, made it 
appear, in many ways, as completely insignificant. But when 
at the touch of feeling English deism flared up in the figure 
of Thomas Paine, the orthodox surely must have admitted 
that the old enemy had assumed, if not a more diabolical, at 
least a far more dangerous and appalling form. The reason 

1 Or, more strictly, the pantheism of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and 
others — the men from whom Pope got his own. 



16 

to which early eighteenth century thinkers appealed was a 
dim abstraction ; the Reason to whom the French Revolutionists 
built aliars was a living goddess. 

Now this transformation of old ideas by new emotion, of 
which we have just given an example, let loose upon the planet 
sometimes constructive, sometimes destructive, forces. Indeed 
nothing could prove more clearly the point on which we are 
insisting, could show more conclusively that the world had 
reached one of the great turning points of its history, than the 
character of the French Revolution itself, a movement at once 
so conspicuously an end and a beginning. 

" Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam 
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream," 

wrote Shelley, and he condensed a wonderful amount into 
those two short lines. Smiles and wrecks — these were the 
characteristic products of the age, blasted institutions and blos- 
soming ideals ; and it is partly because they were its character- 
istic products that this age assumes, frequently, an aspect of 
such wild confusion. What can be more startling, for instance, 
than the fact that, at the very time when the historical way 
of regarding things was grounding itself firmly in the minds 
of men, a movement should occur whose very essence was 
the denial of history? — what more startling than at just the 
moment when the world was learning that society and civiliza- 
tion are the products of an evolution, to have the thesis pro- 
pounded that both may be brought, outright, into perfect being ? 
Yet in this very paradox, this very contradiction, we perceive 
the contending forces of the age. Vitalized by passion, two 
mighty conceptions — and to recognize what those conceptions 
were we need only pronounce the names Rousseau and Burke 
— had come to the grapple, and each was to be vanquished, each 
victorious. Each was to be vanquished: the French Revolu- 
tion was the funeral pyre alike of reason and the old regime. 
Each was to be victorious : the French Revolution was a ter- 
rible vindication of authority, experience, and the past, demon- 
strating, in the face of its own principles, the immense signifi- 
cance of historical continuity and evolution; but it was not 



17 

less a staggering blow to all blind worship of custom and tra- 
dition, to all unreasoning acceptance of the sacredness of creeds 
and institutions. And so, when the smoke of the Revolution 
began to clear away, to those who had eyes to see, both reason 
and the established order stood discredited. Never again with 
hope of general countenance could " reason " put forth such 
arrogant pretensions, never again could the established order, 
simply because it was the established order, claim such au- 
thority. The world was convinced that there was something 
rotten at the heart of the existing state; but the world began 
to look for some other means of removing that rottenness than 
the deification of reason, to search for some other avenue than 
that of the pure intellect through which to approach the deepest 
problems of life. A new standard of truth was demanded ; 
and seeking to discover such a standard, men began more and 
more to favor the belief that other faculties beside the under- 
standing, that the imaginative, the practical, and moral sides of 
man's nature play a part in his apprehension of the truth. To 
the wonderful accuracy with which they embody this funda- 
mental shifting of the view-point of the world, not less than to 
their own intrinsic merit, must be attributed the immense sig- 
nificance and influence of the two Critiques of Immanuel Kant, 1 
and of the two parts of Goethe's Faust; while, on the other 
hand, the failure of a philosophy like that of Hegel to retain 
vitality and power must be attributed, in no small measure, to 
its vain attempt to re-enthrone the dialectic method. Varied as 
have been the faiths and ideals of the nineteenth century, it is 
not a little remarkable to note how the attempt to find some 
more satisfactory basis of truth to replace the rejected standard 
of pure reason imparts a certain unity of purpose to views of 
life which, in other respects, differ oftentimes widely enough. 
To take only a few examples where many might be chosen, 
and to confine these few to England : Coleridge's exaltation 
of " Reason " over the understanding, Wordsworth's nature- 
worship, the mysticism of Shelley, Carlyle's gospel of work, 
the art-philosophy of Ruskin, the " culture " of Arnold, Tenny- 

1 Kant's two Critiques (1781 and 1788), to be sure, both antedate the 
fall of the Bastile. 
3 



18 

son's trust in " faith " and " wisdom " rather than in " knowl- 
edge," Browning's appeal from the intellect to the heart, even 
the agnosticism of Spencer, the utilitarianism of Mill, and the 
Catholicism of Newman — each of these reveals some aspect 
of this search for a deeper way of seeking after truth, each, 
in one manner or another, aims a blow at the ascendency of 
reason. 

This much has been said of European tendencies in the 
eighteenth century, and of some of their results, because it 
is only in their light — or indeed as a part of them — that the 
story of American religious development can be understood. 
The history of American thought is, in its largest outlines, 
identical with that of Europe, though generally, save in politics, 
America lagged several decades, sometimes nearer a whole 
century, behind. Just as the various movements of the revolu- 
tionary age in Europe were both culminations of the eighteenth 
century and revolts against it, so New England transcenden- 
talism — whatever else it may have been — was both a culmina- 
tion of that typically eighteenth century movement, early Amer- 
ican Unitarianism, and at the same time a revolt against it. 
Transcendentalism, furthermore, was just such a union of 
thought and feeling as those we have been describing. And 
just as there emerged in Europe with the passing of the age 
of reason the longing for a new and deeper standard of truth, 
so transcendentalism was, in part, a search for some such pro- 
founder and more comprehensive way of grasping the nature 
of man and of the world. 

New England took no plunge, as England did, from the 
moral heights of Puritanism into the abyss of Restoration 
licentiousness. But there was a descent, which, if more 
gradual, was not on that account less real. Extreme Puritanism 
held within itself the germ of its own disintegration. As a 
mere matter of psychology, the intensity of Massachusetts 
Puritanism of the first generation could not be indefinitely 
continued, and some decline from earlier religious fervor was 
even more inevitable in a pioneer community where material 
development and protection from the Indians were crying neces- 



19 

sities. Already, by the second generation, the falling off in 
piety was conspicuous, and at the time when Increase Mather 
was instrumental in calling the " Reforming Synod " of 1679 
there was sad evidence, he believed, of " decay of godliness in 
the land ; of the increase of pride ; neglect of worship ; sabbath 
breaking ; lack of family government ; censurings, intemperance, 
falsehood, and love of the world." 1 Though the widespread 
belief in witchcraft and the frequent occurrence of witchcraft 
delusions throughout the seventeenth century may make one 
hesitate to say so, it seems difficult not to regard Salem Witch- 
craft, from some points of view at least, as the reductio< ad 
absurdum of the extreme religious spirit. It showed, appar- 
ently, that the old Puritanism had passed its prime, and it 
surely hastened the advent of more rational and common-sense 
ideas ; while, to make the reaction stronger, all through the 
eighteenth century, especially in the neighborhood of Boston, 
the commercial and political questions of the day were sufficient 
to render impossible any exclusive absorption of the com- 
munity's attention in things religious. 

But the causes of these changes in the spiritual atmosphere 
were not wholly indigenous. English rationalistic and free- 
thinking tendencies penetrated to the colonies — and not always 
so slowly as might be imagined — and they had, particularly in 
the accessible region about Boston, their immediate effect. 
" Heresies " began to creep into the religious world. Reflect- 
ing the contemporary English interest in questions of morality, 
Arminianism 2 appeared in Massachusetts, giving an unor- 
thodox importance to matters of conduct, and attacking, 
though insidiously, the Calvinistic doctrine of election. The 
early Arminians in America, though they still believed that man 
was saved by the sovereign grace and mercy of God, held 
nevertheless that man could aid the operation of that grace 
by putting himself in a proper attitude for its reception, by 
attending, as it were, to what were called the " means " of 

1 Quoted from Williston Walker, A History of the Congregational 
Churches in the United States, 187. 

2 See Ibid., 85 et seq., and 252 ; also, Cooke, Unitarianism in America, 
37- 



20 

grace ; and gradually more and more efficiency was attributed 
to these " means." Arianism, too, appeared, subtly under- 
mining the doctrine of the Trinity. 

Nothing could show more clearly the religious condition of 
New England during the first half of the eighteenth century 
than the career of Jonathan Edwards and the story of the Great 
Awakening. The apprehensions of Edwards were aroused by 
two causes, and the Great Awakening was designed to remedy 
two evils — the spiritual deadness and the doctrinal heresies 
of the time. It need hardly be added that to Edwards these 
were aspects of one thing. The great wave of enthusiasm 
that swept over the colony was the protest against the decline 
of piety, the treatise on The Freedom of the Will the most 
famous part of the protest against the doctrinal Arminianism of 
the day. But what could better prove that New England, too, 
was living in the same eighteenth century with Europe, and 
that she was even less ready than England for any high mani- 
festation of feeling, than the rapidity with which the emotional 
wave subsided and the completeness with which the old apathy 
returned? While the religious views of Jonathan Edwards 
were too spiritually lofty and too intellectually original and 
profound to be properly termed retrogressive in any age, and 
while in him and in his remarkable wife we find many anticipa- 
tions of transcendentalism itself, it cannot be denied that, his- 
torically, his influence proved on the whole reactionary. Put 
Edwards beside any one of his Boston Arminian opponents. 
Can there be a moment's hesitation as to which was the greater 
man, the greater genius? But on the other hand, can there 
be any more question as to which was in closer touch with the 
dominant spirit of the time? The Great Awakening is the 
American analog of the Methodist movement 1 — emotionally 
prophetic, theologically, in the main, reactionary. 

The New England revival did not close the opening gulf 
in the religious world. It widened it rather. The efforts of 
Edwards had increased and consolidated the enemies he sought 

1 The part that Whitefield played in the American movement is well 
known. For the influence of the Great Awakening on Wesley, see Allen, 
Jonathan Edwards, 133. 



21 

to slay ; and the adherents of the opposing views continued in 
constantly diverging paths. The New Calvinists, 1 as the 
followers of Edwards were called, went on to develop an 
American theology, uninfluenced essentially by European 
thought, and the large product of doctrinal discussion that 
resulted is the orthodox contribution to the age of reason. 
The liberal school, on the other hand, confirmed by the excesses 
of the Great Awakening in their dislike of enthusiasm, and 
constantly closer in touch with various forms of English think- 
ing, grew more and more liberal, until, as the differences be- 
tween their own and the New Calvinist views became wider 
and wider, the term Unitarian was finally applied to them. 2 

It must not be forgotten that this movement had little direct 
connection with the English Unitarianism of Priestley and 
that it exhibited practically none of his materialistic and 
Socinian tendencies. This is only one reason why the term 
Unitarian is in some ways unfortunate, in some ways apt to 
prove misleading. It must be made to cover — if names are 
to correspond with realities — the whole early movement for 
freedom of thought and release from tradition within the New 
England religious world, and of that movement, discussions of 
the Trinity and of the nature of Christ were manifestly but 
single aspects. 3 Unitarianism was something more than a 
passing agitation over a few theological doctrines. It was the 
product within this New England religious world of the com- 
bined rational and questioning tendencies of the age. It was . 
contributed to not merely directly, from within, by writers or 
thought-currents of a religious sort ; but it was contributed to 
also indirectly, from without, by whatever struck at tradition. 
Skeptical opinions that were in the air, the turmoil that accom- 

1 The distinction between the Old Calvinists and the followers of 
Edwards may be practically neglected for the purposes of this essay. 

2 The term was not employed until very late. See Walker, A History 
of the Cong. Churches in the U. S., 338. 

3 Indeed the doctrines of total depravity and eternal punishment seem, 
in some ways, to have been even more conspicuously the center of the 
controversy. 



22 

parried the Revolutionary War, 1 speculations from France that 
preceded 1789 and echoes that followed it 2 — these things 
had various effects in various spheres of New England life, 
but within the religious sphere they tended, for the time, to 
strengthen the Unitarian position. Early American Unitarian- 
ism was eminently typical of the critical century in which it 
appeared. It seems, in many ways, much more a negative 
than a positive movement, or — if the term negative be ob- 
jectionable — much more preparatory than final. Its essence 
consists more than in anything else in this : that it was a reac- 
tion from Calvinism. Its most immediate positive product 
was, perhaps, the atmosphere of tolerance it created. 

If we have characterized the movement correctly, its con- 
tinuity, then, cannot be insisted on too strongly. In 1785 King's 
Chapel became Unitarian by the revision of its liturgy 3 — the 
first open denial of the doctrine of the Trinity by a New Eng- 
land church organization. This year is accordingly fre- 
quently chosen to mark the beginning of the movement. But 
the singling out of any one initial date is useless and confusing. 
The King's Chapel event was but one incident in a long de- 
velopment, and its real significance is that of an unmistakable 
sign that toward the end of the century the struggle between 

1 See, " Life in Boston in the Revolutionary Period," by Horace E. 
Scudder, being Chapter iv of Volume iii of The Memorial History of 
Boston. 

2 William Ellery Channing's account of conditions at Harvard at the 
time he entered college (1794) gives an idea of the feeling of unrest 
that pervaded the country. " College was never in a worse state than 
when I entered it. Society was passing through a most critical stage. 
The French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the 
understanding of men everywhere. The old foundations of social order, 
loyalty, tradition, habit, reverence for antiquity, were everywhere shaken, 
if not subverted. The authority of the past was gone. The old forms 
were outgrown, and new ones had not taken their place. The tone of 
books and conversation was presumptuous and daring. The tendency of 
all classes was to skepticism." (Channing, 30. See also Miss Peabody, 
Reminiscences, 253.) 

3 Both the pastor, Rev. James Freeman, and the people were of ad- 
vanced views, but Rev. William Hazlitt (father of the essayist), who 
was then in America, was especially influential in bringing about the 
change. 



23 

the liberals and the orthodox was approaching a critical stage. 
In this sense only it was a beginning. 

In 1 80 1, because their new pastor (Rev. James Kendall) ex- 
hibited, they thought, too advanced views, half the members 
of the original Pilgrim Church at Plymouth withdrew, found- 
ing a new organization that kept to the old faith. In 1805 
Harvard College, which from the first had been a stronghold 
of the more radical thought, passed into the complete control 
of the Unitarians by the appointment of Rev. Henry Ware 
as Hollis Professor of Divinity 1 — an event which soon caused 
the establishment of Andover Theological Seminary by the 
opposition. Another influence toward liberalism was the 
Monthly Anthology." 1 This publication was begun (but soon 
abandoned) by a young graduate of Harvard. It was then 
assumed and continued through ten volumes by Emerson's 
father, the Rev. William Emerson, and the friends whom he 
gathered round him. This group was known as The Anthol- 
ogy Club, 3 and their organ, though dedicated to the service 
of literature and general culture, discussed theology to some 
extent. In 181 5 the whole controversy reached a climax, for 
then began — and continued for a quarter of a century — the 
open division of the Congregational churches 4 into the Uni- 
tarian and the Trinitarian, a division accelerated, and on the 
orthodox side embittered, by the decision of the Massachusetts 
Supreme Court in the famous Dedham Case. 5 

When we remember the varied tides of emotion that during 
these years were sweeping over Europe, the condition of New 
England life in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century 
seems, at first sight at least, somewhat inexplicable. It is 
clear that there had come no general invasion of European 
enthusiasm. Beginning about 1790 — and lasting for two gen- 

1 Cooke, Unitarianism in America, 94. 

2 Ibid., 95. 

3 Other members were Samuel Cooper Thacher, Joseph Stevens Buck- 
minster, Joseph Tuckerman, and John S. J. Gardiner. Ibid., 96. 

i Ibid., 117. 

5 For discussions of this decision, see Ellis, A Half-Century of the 
Unitarian Controversy, 415 ; Walker, A History of the Cong. Churches 
in the U. S., 342. 



24 

erations — a new series of revivals took place in the Trinitarian 
churches, and it is impossible to believe that these had no 
connection with the wider emotional currents of the day, though 
such a relationship it might be somewhat difficult to establish. 
It is obvious, too, that of the controversial sort there was no 
lack in the religious world of most intense and bitter feeling. 
But, after all, it seems plain that the spirit of the earlier 
eighteenth century, with all its lethargy and lack of fire, had 
lasted over, widely, in New England. Much of the community 
was still emotionally starved, and the young people especially 
must have looked about them in vain for that which could 
offer any lasting satisfaction to their deeper feelings. 

The prevalent philosophy was the common-sense philosophy 
of Locke; the prevalent literature was still that of the unin- 
spiring " classical " school. The educational world, conspicu- 
ously, within which the feelings of the young would naturally 
be fed, was infected with apathy. There is no reason to doubt 
that the descriptions given, for instance, by George Ticknor 
and James Freeman Clarke, 1 of conditions prevailing at Har- 
vard, are just and characteristic. Of Professor John Farrar, 
who lectured in philosophy and the sciences, Clarke says, " He 
was a true teacher, but almost the only one in the whole corps 
of the professors." And then, as an example, is given an 
account of the Greek teacher, who never displayed any en- 
thusiasm or the slightest appreciation of the poetry of the Iliad, 
The result was that the students' began seeking emotional 
satisfaction outside the curriculum. 2 

It should be remarked too that, during much of the period 
we are discussing, the young New Englander who turned to 
politics did not find the prospect bright. New England, the 
stronghold of Federalism, was, during the ascendency of the 
Democratic party, to a considerable degree politically isolated. 

1 J. F. Clarke, Autobiography, 36-39. Life, Letters, and Journals of 
George Ticknor, i, chapter xviii. 

2 " They did not read Thucydides and Xenophon, but Macaulay and 
Carlyle. . . . Our real professors of rhetoric were Charles Lamb and 
Coleridge, Walter Scott and Wordsworth." — a statement which shows 
that the condition of emotional indifference still survived at the time 
when the writings of Macaulay and Carlyle were becoming known. 



25 

In the words of Professor Trent, " it was a period of American 
history in which politics offered no great allurements to young 
men trained as the best New Englanders were. Although 
Daniel Webster had already become the idol of his countrymen, 
it was plain that the democratic rule of Jackson offered more 
opportunities to the tricky politician than to the trained states- 
man," 1 — a condition of things highly favorable, it will be 
realized, to the advent of transcendentalism. 

But this lack of enthusiasm, so widespread, was hardly any- 
where more noticeable than in the Unitarian world. The 
Unitarians were, indeed, in a peculiarly untenable position. 
Their eighteenth century spirit had survived its usefulness — yet 
they clung to it tenaciously. The eighteenth century was an 
age of transition — and they were seeking to make its views 
and temper permanent. The eighteenth century was an age 
of compromise — and they would render its position final. The 
eighteenth century was an age of preparation — and they re- 
mained unwilling to advance. They had no philosophy to 
give their views consistency, and indeed no philosophy can be 
conceived that could have performed, even superficially, a task 
so hopelessly gigantic. With the orthodox and their " super- 
stitions " on the one side and the kindly abyss that Hume with 
his logic had prepared for the reception of all rationalism on 
the other, the Unitarians were, most veritably, between the 
devil and the deep sea. And their enemies perceived their 
dilemma better, probably, than they did themselves. They 
were charged with lack of boldness in defending their posi- 
tion, even with cowardice and duplicity. Emerson's phrase 
" the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism " had, beyond 
doubt, justification, while Theodore Parker summed up their 
spiritual coldness in words that, at the same time, reveal how 
among the Unitarian preachers the eighteenth century interest 
in morality had still survived : " I felt early that the ' liberal ' 
ministers did not do justice to simple religious feeling; to 
me their preaching seemed to relate too much to outward 
things, not enough to the inward pious life ; their prayers felt 
cold ; but certainly they preached the importance and religious 

1 A History of American Literature, 303. 



26 

value of morality as no sect, I think, had done before. . . . 
The defect of the Unitarians was a profound one. . . . It is 
a dismal fault in a religious party, this lack of Piety, and dis- 
mally have the Unitarians answered it; yet let their great 
merits and services be not forgot." 1 It is indeed important 
that the merits of the Unitarians — in spite of the fact that 
their present position was a prosaic and in some respects a 
ridiculous one — should be remembered, for many and high 
those merits surely were. The typical Unitarian of the time, 2 
as far as there was any such, was a man of tolerance, of in- 
tellect, of cultured tastes, of unexceptionable private morality 
and notable civic virtue, as well as of many other admirable 
qualities, but not — let it be repeated — either metaphysical or 
emotionally spiritual in his temperament. Philosophy and 
enthusiasm he did not have; yet philosophy and enthusiasm 
were exactly the things of which his religion stood most 
lamentably in need. 

Now the time was bound to come when the intense fervor 
and the new ideals of Europe should make their way to New 
England. And at that hour there were bound to be young 
people there ready to welcome and receive them. In so far 
as the new spirit was to enter the religious world — and it must 
not be forgotten that New England was still pre-eminently a 
religious community — it was natural, if like conditions were 
to produce the same or similar effects, that it should appeal 
most strongly to the Unitarians. Why? Precisely because 
the Unitarians, having taken their course in the (rational) 
spirit of the eighteenth century, were ready for that of the 
nineteenth, ready for it in a way in which the orthodox were 
not and could not be. If the Unitarians had carried over into 
the nineteenth the temper of the eighteenth century, it may 
almost be said — if the statement is not taken too literally — 
that the orthodox had carried over into the nineteenth the 
temper of the seventeenth century. Significant changes might 

1 Weiss, ii, 481 et seq. 

2 See Garnett, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 84; Frothingham, George 
Ripley, 42; Frothingham, Theodore Parker, 151; Channing, Works, iii, 
147; Trent, A History of American Literature, 298. 



27 

first be expected then within the ranks of the " liberals," and 
signs were not completely lacking that changes were at work. 

A man who early showed symptoms of appreciating the 
religious needs of the time, and who, had not early death cut 
short a career of exceptional promise, would inevitably have 
played an even more important part than he did in the de- 
velopment we are discussing, was the Rev. Joseph Stevens i 
Buckminster (1784-1812). He was a preacher of great 
scholarship and eloquence, and of considerable literary power. 
The letters between the father, Rev. Joseph Buckminster 
(1751-1812), the stern old Calvinist, and his Unitarian son, 
throw much light on the times. 1 In his sermons the latter 
opposed the doctrinal in favor of the spiritual and practical, 
and in Biblical scholarship, with the critical material and tools 
gained in Europe, accomplished so much that he was appointed 
the first lecturer in Biblical criticism at Harvard, and George 
Ticknor wrote of him, " It has, in our opinion, hardly been 
permitted to any other man to render so considerable a service 
as this to Christianity in the western world." 2 

But there was another man who, more than anyone else in 
the religious world, showed himself open to the influence of 
the Zeitgeist, and who, largely because of this, became a power 
in the land whose effect is not likely to be overrated. This 
man, it need scarcely be added, was William Ellery Channing 
( 1 780-1 842). Channing is usually spoken of as the great 
Unitarian, and his famous sermon on " Unitarian Christianity," 3 
preached at the ordination of Jared Sparks at Baltimore in 
1819, is generally looked on as being in a sense the formulation 
of the denomination's creed. But if Channing was a Unitarian, 
he was one of an entirely new type ; and with him — if we are 
to give him that name — the continuity of Unitarian develop- 
ment seems almost broken. Indeed the more one studies his 
character and beliefs in relation to his time, the more one 
must feel that he was scarcely a Unitarian at all, but rather 

1 See Trent, A History of American Literature, 293. Mrs. E. B. Lee, 
Memoirs of the Buckminsters, 141. 

2 Cooke, Unitarianism in America, 390. See also Christian Examiner, 
xlvii, 186; Channing, 124; Memoirs of the Buckminsters. 

3 Works, iii, 59. 



28 

the first of the transcendentalists. He had precisely what the 
Unitarians of the day had not — enthusiasm, a deeply spiritual 
character, and a liking for philosophy. His true position is 
seen in his own declaration that Unitarianism is " only the 
vestibule" 1 of truth. This claim, to be sure, must not be 
pressed too far. 2 In his theology and philosophy Channing 
appears not infrequently about half way between the Uni- 
tarian and the transcendental position. In such a sermon as 
his Likeness to God 3 he is almost completely transcendental ; 
but when he discourses on miracles 4 or the future state 5 he 
seems very far from Emerson and Parker. 6 The point is, 
however, that he shows a development in the transcendental 
direction, and that all those distinctive doctrines which gave 
his preaching, uniqueness and significance in his own day and 
which give him historical importance now, flowed from the 
transcendental elements in his belief. An example will make 
this clear. The Calvinists believed that human nature is 
totally depraved ; the Unitarians denied this, their denial carry- 
ing with it the positive implication that human nature is 
essentially good ; the transcendentalists believed that human 
nature is divine. What could show more clearly where 
Channing really stood than the fact that his " one sublime 
idea " was no other than this of the divinity of human nature ? 
And further than this his temper and general spirit were 
singularly like those of the transcendentalists. He was, to 

1 Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 56. 

2 The whole question after all is mainly a matter of definition, the 
definition of Unitarianism. The contention merely is that to call both 
Channing and the typical Unitarian of the time Unitarians is quite like 
making no distinction between the orthodox and the liberals of a 
hundred years before. There was at this time, as then, a very real 
distinction, and new names or at least new qualifying adjectives are 
demanded. 

3 Works, iii, 227. 
Ibid., 107. 
Ibid., iv, 228. 

6 For Channing's criticism of the transcendentalists, see (from a letter 
to Dr. Martineau) Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, 187; and 
for his differences with Parker, Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 427. See 
also Ibid., 364. 



29 

be sure, much more conservative, but his conservatism 1 was 
the inevitable outcome, among other things, of the earlier date 
of his birth. That his influence on the transcendentalists was 
so powerful and their sympathy for him so great — Emerson 
called him " our Bishop " 2 — is the surest proof of the tran- 
scendentalism of his own nature. These are some of the 
reasons for giving Channing a fairly full treatment in the 
present study, even to the exclusion of men who, at a cursory 
glance, may seem more intimately connected with the move- 
ment under consideration. To omit Channing in discussing 
transcendentalism would be to omit a large part of the first act 
of the play. 

A few sentences of his own will perhaps best make clear the 
general truth of these contentions and show how fully he saw 
the hour's need and felt the wider spirit of the time. He 
wrote in 1820: 

" I have before told you how much I think Unitarianism 
has suffered from union with a heart-withering philosophy. 
I will now add, that it has suffered also from a too exclusive 
application of its advocates to biblical criticism and theological 
controversy, in other words, from a too partial culture of the 
mind. I fear that we must look to other schools for the 
thoughts which thrill us, which touch the most inward springs, 
and disclose to us the depths of our own souls." 3 

And these words were spoken in 1824: 

" Now, religion ought to be dispensed in accommodation to 
this spirit and character of our age. Men desire excitement, 
and religion must be communicated in a more exciting form. 
. . . Men will not now be trifled with. . . . They want 
a religion which will take a strong hold upon them. . . . 
Much as the age requires intellectual culture in a minister, it 
requires still more, that his acquisitions of truth should be 
instinct with life and feeling." 4 

But it was not merely a new religious spirit to which Chan- 

1 These points are more fully discussed in chapters II and IV. 

2 Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 371. 

3 Channing, 276. 

4 Works, iii, 146. 



30 

ning was awake ; he appreciated as well the significance of the 
romantic note in the new fiction and poetry : 

" The poetry of the age . . . has a deeper and more im- 
pressive tone than comes to us from what has been called the 
Augustan age of English literature. The regular, elaborate, 
harmonious strains, which delighted a former generation, are 
now accused, I say not how justly, of playing too much on 
the surface of nature and of the heart. Men want and de- 
mand a more thrilling note, a poetry which pierces beneath the 
exterior of life to the depths of the soul, and which lays open 
its mysterious workings, borrowing from the whole outward 
creation fresh images and correspondences, with which to 
illuminate the secrets of the world within us. So keen is this 
appetite, that extravagances of imagination, and gross viola- 
tions both of taste and moral sentiment, are forgiven, when 
conjoined with what awakens strong emotion." 1 

Such words as these show plainly what was taking place 
— especially the references to " other schools " that must be 
looked to for " the thoughts which thrill us." That very 
phrase, "the thoughts which thrill us," tells it all. At last 
within the New England religious world was happening what 
had long since been happening across the water : radical ideas 
were being kindled with emotion. The theological and spiritual 
revolution that long had threatened now had come. There 
had been reasons for its delay. Revolutionary Europe had 
indeed already wrought some confusion by battering harshly 
on the outside of the conservative New England meeting-house ; 
but even revolutionary Europe could cause a vitally transform- 
ing change inside only as it was the author of some new and 
larger ideal of truth, of some influence that could operate 
from within, some positive influence that could touch and 
move the very hearts of those that worshipped. The words 
of Channing show that such influences were now at work. 
German idealistic thought (especially that aspect of it which 
asserted new validity for the moral and religious instincts of 
man) and the new romantic literature 2 — these things could 

1 Ibid. , 146. 

2 Fuller proof of these statements is given later (especially in Chapter 
II), but we may remark here that the original impetus toward German 



31 

operate from within, these things could appeal to the heart ; 
and they supplied, moreover, exactly what the current Uni- 
tarianism needed most — philosophy and feeling. Their effect 
— as obvious reasons led us to predict — was strongest upon 
certain emotionally starved young people of the time and most 
conspicuous within the Unitarian world. 

One result of this influx of radical speculation and fresh 
feeling was an inevitable division in the Unitarian church be- 
tween those who welcomed and assimilated the new thought 
and spirit, and those who opposed them as dangerous and 
revolutionary, between the transcendentalists, that is, and the 
conservative Unitarians. In connection with this division it 
is important to notice, in passing, that the significant question 
is not one — for us at least — of approximation toward the truth, 
but one rather of adjustment to the spirit of the age ; and just 
as there is no doubt that a hundred years before Charles 
Chauncy was nearer that spirit than was Jonathan Edwards, 
so there is no doubt that now Channing and Emerson were 
nearer it than — let us say — Professor Andrews Norton. 

The history of this whole development may be represented 
roughly in some such way as this : 

& 



?' 



*? 



Calvinists ..••"' 
-■■■Pr t , 



,-•"' Conservative Unitarians 



J* 

literature had come, about 1819, with the return to America from Got- 
tingen of Edward - Everett, George Bancroft, and George Ticknor. From 
this time on, knowledge of the German language and interest in the 
works of German writers increased, slowly at first, but, with the spread 
of the works of Coleridge and the appearance of Carlyle's, more and 
more rapidly. (See Appendix, in which the question of the early 
interest in German in "New" England is more fully considered.) This 
interest was enhanced and the obtaining of this knowledge facilitated 
by the coming to Harvard, about 1825, as instructor in German — he was 
made professor in 1830 — of Charles T. Follen, a political exile. Other 
Germans who came to New England about the same time were Francis 
Lieber and Dr. Charles Beck, the latter being given in 1832 a place as 
University Professor of Latin at Harvard. 



32 

Of course such a diagram is far enough from explaining what 
transcendentalism — that complex product of most varied forces 
— really was. But it does, we think, fairly well represent its 
New England religious ancestry. It shows that the later 
division was not less real than the earlier; and it indicates in 
a way also that analogy with the development of European 
thought, on which we cannot, again, too strenuously insist. 
Just as the critical age succeeded the Puritan age in England, 
so " liberalism " came with the waning of the earlier New 
England spirit; and just as revolutionary Europe both repu- 
diated the eighteenth century and at the same time accepted 
and transformed it, so the New England transcendentalists 
both repudiated and transformed with new life " the pale 
negations of Boston Unitarianism.' , They rejected its com- 
promises ; they rejected its cold spirit ; but they accepted and 
carried further its rational method, so informing it with feel- 
ing, however, that it passed over into something quite unlike 
itself, the method of spiritual intuition. The diagram illus- 
trates, too, why — though not impossible — it was hard for others 1 
than Unitarians to become transcendentalists. Individuals 
might and did pass rapidly over from the orthodox to the 
transcendental view. But after all, however unconscious of 
it they might be, it was Unitarianism that had made that easy 
transit possible. The rational spirit is the logical predecessor 
of the transcendental spirit. The enthusiasm of the opening 
sentences of Emerson's Nature and their easy disregard for 
all tradition are so spontaneous and sincere that they seem 
purely original. And purely original, in a sense, they are. 
But behind them, in another sense, are all the doubts and 
questionings of the age of reason, and in them the feeling of 
an entire epoch of European life. 

It must not be understood, when we speak of a division 
within the Unitarian church, that there was an open schism or 
even, in every case, a definite taking of sides on the new issues. 
No; like the "liberal" movement of the previous century 

1 Those who started as Calvinists, in most cases, seem to have passed 
through something corresponding to a Unitarian stage in their de- 
velopment. 



33 

this movement was a gradual development, and it is impossible 
to put one's finger on any point and call it a beginning. Such 
an event, however, as Emerson's withdrawal from the ministry 
in 1832 — owing mainly to a feeling that he could not con- 
scientiously administer the communion — is comparable to the 
King's Chapel occurrence of 1785, already mentioned, and 
shows clearly the direction in which things were moving. 

But it is especially in various publications and addresses of 
the fourth decade of the century that the progress of the 
" new " thought is most easily traced ; and in confirmation 
of what we have said of the gradual growth of the transcen- 
dental spirit it is significant to remark that a number of these 
publications reached their readers through the columns of the 
Christian Examiner, the official organ of the Unitarian church. 
One of the most influential of them, probably, was an article 
on Coleridge — and incidentally on German philosophy — by Rev. 
Frederick Henry Hedge, which appeared in the Examiner for 
March, 1833. Hedge, who had been a pupil of George Ban- 
croft, knew the German language well, was a man of ripe and 
sound scholarship, and would have played — had he lived nearer 
to Boston, and had his nature been a little more aggressive 
— a far more prominent part than he did in the movement. 
As it is, he must be reckoned one of the earliest and most 
influential of transcendentalists. There were other radical 
articles in the Examiner. George Ripley, between 1830 and 
1837, wrote ten such papers, " all either stating or foreshadow- 
ing his later conclusions." 1 One of these, that on Martineau's 
Rationale of Religious Inquiry (November, 1836), caused 
somewhat of a sensation in conservative Unitarian circles. It 
elicited a reprimand for Ripley from Professor Andrews Nor- 
ton in the Boston Advertiser. 

In 1836 Emerson published Nature — a little work which 
comes nearer perhaps than anything else to being the philo- 
sophical " constitution " of transcendentalism. It was a call 
on the author's part to the world around him to realize that 
" the sun shines today also," and hence to cast aside conformity 
and live lives in touch with nature — " nature " in the sense 

1 Frothingham, Life of Ripley, 94. 
4 



34 

of the natural constitution of things. He followed this up 
the next year with his Phi Beta Kappa oration, The American 
Scholar, simply an application of the conceptions of Nature 
to the world of literature and scholarship in the widest sense, 
a plea for originality and individualism in the realm of letters. 
Though in this address Emerson was careful not to let his phi- 
losophy obtrude itself, transcendental thought, nevertheless, 
forms the real essence of the essay. In 1839 came the Divinity 
School Address, another specific application of Emersonian 
philosophy, this time to the world of theology and religion. 
This utterance was widely considered the most radically dan- 
gerous declaration of the new school which had appeared up 
to that time, and called forth an immediate answer in behalf 
I of the conservatives from Professor Andrews Norton. This, 
under the title, The Latest Form of Infidelity, was a vigorous 
attack on the intuitional philosophy, 1 and elicited, in its turn, 
from George Ripley, a spirited rejoinder, " The Latest Form 
of Infidelity " Examined. Theodore Parker's declaration of 
war, his South Boston sermon on The Transient and Per- 
manent in Christianity, was delivered in 1841. In connection 
with these various publications and addresses, here is perhaps 
the best place to note that the year 1838 was marked by the 
appearance of the first two of a significant and influential series 
of fourteen volumes, Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature 
(reprinted in Edinburgh in 1857), of which Ripley was the 
main editor. The opening volumes were called Philosophical 
Miscellanies, and contained among other things, translations 
from Cousin and Jouffroy. The same year saw the appear- 
ance of Emerson's collection of some of Carlyle's " Review " 
articles, under the title of Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 
The American edition of Sartor Resartus had been issued two 
years earlier. 

But meanwhile, long before the latest of the events we have 
just been chronicling, something approaching a transcendental 
organization had been effected. It is characteristic of the 
extreme individualism of the movement that it never attained 
a really formal organization. The dissenters did not withdraw 

1 See also two articles in the Princeton Review, XI, 37, and XII, 31. 



35 

from Unitarianism and form a new church. It was natural, 
however, that kindred spirits who, in the words of Emerson, 
" perhaps . . . only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge 
and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure 
and sympathy," 1 should find one another out. This they had 
done many months before any regular transcendental gather- 
ings seem to have been contemplated. It was not until 1836 
that these were begun, when on September 19 — after a still 
smaller preliminary conference — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fred- 
erick Henry Hedge, Convers Francis, James Freeman Clarke, 
and Amos Bronson Alcott, met with George Ripley at the 
latter's house and formed the germ of an organization to aid 
an exchange of thought among those interested in the " new 
views " in philosophy, theology, and literature. 2 How far the 
later meetings were simply informal gatherings of sympathetic 
souls and how far there was a real distinction between mem- 
bers and non-members is a question concerning which there is 
little evidence. We may be perfectly certain, however, on a 
priori grounds, that they found it possible to dispense with all 
such mundane things as by-laws, minutes, and membership 
rolls. It was in connection with these meetings, probably, 
that the popular, satirical use of " transcendental " first arose. 
At any rate to the outside world those who attended them made 
up the Transcendental Club. To the initiated the group was 
known as the Symposium or the Hedge Club — the latter name 
being due to the fact that meetings of the Club were frequently 
called when Dr. Hedge, whose home was in Bangor, made a 
trip to Boston. From 1836 the Club continued to come to- 
gether occasionally for a number of years — how occasionally 
or for how many years we do not know, for only the most 
meagre reports and records of the gatherings now exist. 

Among those who were not at the first but who joined the 
group at later meetings, or were present now and then, were : 
Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Orestes A. Brownson, 

1 Works, x, 323. 

2 The accounts in Frothingham's Ripley (54), Cabot's Emerson (244, 
Dr. Hedge's account), Cooke's Emerson (56, from Alcott's Journal), and 
Higginson's Margaret Fuller Ossoli (142), differ slightly as to those 
present at the early meetings. 



36 

Cyrus A. Bartol, Caleb Stetson, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody, 
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Jones Very, Christopher P. Cranch, 
Charles T. Follen, and William Henry Channing. Dr. Chan- 
ning and George Bancroft seem to have been present on one 
occasion. Of the men just mentioned to whom we shall not 
make further extended reference, there are two to whom, 
partly from their eccentricities, there attaches a peculiar inter- 
est — Jones Very and Orestes A. Brownson. We may pause 
here, then, long enough to remark that Very was a clergyman 
and poet of an extreme mystical tendency, whose capacity for 
soaring above terrestrial conditions of time and space gave rise 
to many amusing anecdotes of varying degrees of authenticity. 
Of Brownson and his erratic career we may note that, having 
passed through successive stages of Presbyterianism, Universal- 
ism, Socialism, and Unitarianism, and having coquetted with 
transcendentalism (and, it might be added, with politics), he 
completed the cycle of his intellectual and religious experiences 
by emerging in 1844 as a full-fledged Roman Catholic. He 
spent much of the rest of his long life in administering fer- 
ocious chastisement to Protestantism — and incidentally to tran- 
scendentalism — in the columns of Brownsori s Quarterly Re- 
view. The militant element in his nature is hinted at in Dr. 
Hedge's remark apropos of the Transcendental Club : " Brown- 
son met with us once or twice, but became unbearable, and 
was not afterward invited." Yet there is no doubt that 
Brownson was a man of exceptional ability. 

For some time before anything definite came of the desire, 1 
it was felt by the aspostles of the new movement that they 
ought to have a literary organ, and in 1840, with the appear- 
ance of the first number of the Dial, 2 this long-projected tran- 

1 See e. g., Higginson, 141. 

2 The Dial has been reprinted by the Rowfant Club of Cleveland (see 
bibliography) ; for the authorship of the various articles and accom- 
panying biographical data, see G. W. Cooke's An Historical and Bio- 
graphical Introduction to accompany the Dial (see bibliography). Also 
see Journal of Speculative Philosophy, xix, 262. 

The Dial was in some respects inspired by and modeled after the 
New Monthly Magazine of the Englishman, John A. Heraud, of whom 
Carlyle has given a portrait. The proposal of Orestes A. Brownson that 
the new enterprise be merged in his Boston Quarterly Review (1838- 
1842) was rejected. 



37 

scendental magazine became — to use a phrase which in different 
senses will satisfy all — a realized dream, with Margaret Fuller 
for editor and George Ripley as assistant editor. It never 
even approached financial success, and it was only through 
real devotion and sacrifice on the part of its editor and Miss 
Elizabeth Peabody that it was continued as long as it was. 
Miss Fuller resigned the editorship after two years and Emer- 
son assumed it for a like period, after which the magazine was 
discontinued. Whatever defects the Dial may have had — 
and it obviously had many — a comparison of its pages with the 
dusty contemporary numbers of, let us say, the North American 
Review, is enough to convince one that the claim of its main 
contributors that they were dealing with subjects whose inter- 
est in a measure transcends time, is not entirely without 
foundation. The journal discussed questions of theology and 
philosophy; it contained — besides many other things — papers 
on art, music, and literature, especially German literature ; 
translations from ancient " Oriental Scriptures " ; original 
modern " scriptures " in the form of Alcott's Orphic Sayings; 
and finally, a good deal of verse. In this latter connection, 
one of the most interesting aspects of the Dial today is the 
opportunity and encouragement it afforded to the genius of 
Thoreau. Besides his and Emerson's, there were, among 
others, metrical contributions from Lowell, Ellery Channing, 
and Christopher P. Cranch — the latter one of the most pic- 
turesque figures of the period (an ex-minister who gave up 
preaching to study art abroad), poet, painter, musician, and 
ventriloquist. The Dial, it is needless to remark, did not satisfy 
the public. Hundreds of parodies, especially of the Orphic 
Sayings, were forthcoming, and " epithets, too, were showered 
about as freely as imitations; the Philadelphia 'Gazette,' for 
instance, calling the editors of the new journal ' zanies,' ' Bed- 
lamites,' and ' considerably madder than the Mormons.' M1 Nor 
did it even fulfil the hopes of the transcendentalists themselves. 
Alcott thought it tame and compromising : " It satisfies me not, 
nor Emerson. It measures not the meridian but the morning 
ray; the nations wait for the gnomon that shall mark the 

1 Quoted from Higginson, 159. 



38 

broad noon." On the other hand Theodore Parker's declara- 
tion that his own Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1848- 
1850) was to be the Dial " with _a_ beard " indicates that he 
thought the earlier periodical had offended in quite an opposite 
direction. On the whole, however, whatever our judgment of 
its intrinsic merit may be — and the mere fact that it contains 
some of Emerson's best known poems and essays is enough 
to establish a degree of such merit — we shall not be likely to 
overrate its significance in the history of American literature 
or the importance of the part it played in our literary emanci- 
pation. 

Much more remotely connected with the Transcendental 
Club than the Dial was the Brook Farm enterprise. George 
Ripley, to be sure, was the leader in the experiment, but " none 
of the original members [of the Club] accompanied Ripley to 
Brook Farm, and of the later members only Hawthorne and 
Dwight followed him." These last are the words of Mr. 
Lindsay Swift, 1 and a glance at the two chapters of his history 
of Brook Farm which are entitled " The Members " and " The 
Visitors " respectively is in itself sufficient to show that, what- 
ever kinship of spirit there may have been among all these 
men, it is not fanciful to draw a line of distinction between 
the Brook Farmers and the transcendentalists in the stricter 
sense. Indeed, the relation between these two groups of men 
may be pretty well grasped by a mere comparison of the names 
treated in the two chapters of Mr. Swift's book just referred 
to. Singled out for particular mention among " The Mem- 
bers " are, after the Ripleys : Charles A. Dana, John S. 
Dwight, Hawthorne, John Orvis, John Allen, Minot Pratt, 
George P. Bradford, Warren Burton, Charles K. Newcomb ; 
to whom should be added George William Curtis, James Bur- 
rill Curtis, and Father Hecker, discussed in the chapter, " The 
School and its Scholars." Among " The Visitors," on the 
other hand, we find: Margaret Fuller, William Henry Chan- 
ning, Emerson, Alcott, Charles Lane, Brownson, Parker, 
Francis G. Shaw, Cranch, and Elizabeth Peabody (together 
with Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley, treated in another 

1 Brook Farm; Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors, 9. 



39 

connection). These lists require no comment ; yet a few words 
may be said of the history of Brook Farm. 

George Ripley, its head, was a graduate of Harvard and a 
Unitarian minister. As we have already seen, the nature of 
his beliefs was too radical for the Unitarian audience that list- 
ened to him, a fact which, together with his wide studies of 
European writers, led him gradually to see his duty more and 
more along the line of social reform. He accordingly left the 
pulpit; and in 1841 he and his enthusiastic wife gathered 
around them a number of supporters, subscriptions were re- 
ceived at $500 a share for the " Brook Farm Institute of Agri- 
culture and Education," and the enterprise was begun with 
ten signers of the " Articles of Association " and by the pur- 
chase of a farm at West Roxbury, nine miles from Boston. 
While Brook Farm must not be considered an attempt at 
socialism, it was nevertheless collectivistic and communistic in 
its tendency. The hope was to make it a self-supporting group 
of men and women, where all should share in the manual labor, 
the leisure, and the educational and cultural advantages, and 
life be lived under something approaching ideal conditions. 
There has been ample testimony from the members that the 
attempt was far from being entirely unsuccessful. The adop- 
tion in 1844, with some modifications, of the principles of 
Fourier, seems, however, to have put an end to some of the 
more Arcadian features of Brook Farm ; and this, together 
with the fact that the efforts of inexperienced farmers on a 
rather poor farm yielded insufficient financial return, was 
enough to doom the experiment to ultimate failure. The dis- 
banding of the members was immediately occasioned by the 
burning in 1847 °f the new " phalanstery," erected at a cost 
of ten thousand dollars, and — by an appropriate " transcen- 
dental " irony, some will be inclined to comment — uninsured. 
We must not forget to remark that for a time the Brook 
Farmers had a literary organ, The Harbinger. 

There were other attempts during the transcendental period 
at ideal living. Of Bronson Alcott's communal experiment, 
" Fruitlands," which with his family and two English friends 
he undertook on a farm in Harvard, Massachusetts, and which 



40 

cold weather brought to a speedy and disastrous conclusion, 
we shall have occasion to say something later on. Of Thoreau's 
two years at Walden Pond (i 845-1 847) almost everyone has 
heard. There, with a small cabin for headquarters, he prac- 
tised an extreme form of the " simple life," studying the phe- 
nomena of nature, communing with her spirit, and noting down 
his observations and reflections in voluminous diaries. Both 
these enterprises — Alcott' s and Thoreau's — were in most re- 
spects strikingly different in intent from Brook Farm. Espe- 
cially was the Walden Pond episode, in its individualism, the 
most completely transcendental of any of these experiments. 
Mention should not be omitted of one other feature of the 
period — we mean the well-known " conversations." These 
seem on the whole to have been of the nature of informal lec- 
tures, the audience generally being small and the speaker 
willing to be interrupted by questions or comments. Some- 
times the " talk " was more evenly distributed among those 
present, and the leader acted more as the chairman of a con- 
ference who had also the privilege of the floor. The conversa- 
tions of Alcott and Miss Fuller have attained much notoriety 
and some fame. Alcott made use of the conversational method 
in his school teaching, but it was not till after the failure of his 
Temple School in 1839 tnat ne ventured a trial of his theory 
in public. From that time, off and on, for a good many years 
he gave lectures of the conversational type. Miss Fuller's 
conversations began in November, 1839, an d were held con- 
secutively for five winters. The subjects dealt with were 
Greek Mythology, Fine Arts, Ethics, Education, the Influence 
of Woman. The conversations were held as a rule at the end 
of the morning, twenty-five or thirty being the average number 
present. " Ten or a dozen, besides Miss Fuller/' says Mr. 
Higginson, " usually took actual part in the talk. Her method 
was to begin each subject with a short introduction, giving 
the outline of the subject, and suggesting the most effective 
points of view. This done, she invited questions or criticisms : 
if these lagged, she put questions herself, using persuasion for 
the timid, kindly raillery for the indifferent. There was always 
a theme and a thread." 1 

1 Higginson, 115. 



41 

The consideration of a further important aspect of transcen- 
dentalism, its relation to the anti-slavery agitation, may best be 
reserved for a later part of the discussion. Meanwhile, one 
question, suggested by this reference to slavery, belongs to the 
present chapter, the question: When did the transcendental 
period close? There can surely be little dissent from the 
proposition that the movement was at its height during the 
years 1835-1845 ; but to choose a date to mark its conclusion 
is just as impossible as to select one to designate its beginning. 
The results of a movement are often not less significant than 
its causes in explaining its real nature, and to obtain a true 
conception of transcendentalism it is as necessary in some cases 
to follow the lives of the transcendentalists even beyond the 
middle of the century, as it is to trace the early development 
of Unitarianism, or — as we shall attempt to do in the next 
chapter — to examine the intellectual and literary influences that 
moulded the thinking of these men. 



CHAPTER II 

Intellectual and Literary Influences Affecting the 
Transcendentalists 

Their early environment; their reading and studies; their influence 
on one another; Emerson's and Parker's accounts of "the times." 

What were the most potent intellectual and literary in- 
fluences on the thoughts and lives of these leading- transcen- 
dentalists? With a view to an answer to this question the 
present chapter is principally devoted to an account of their 
reading and studies. The emphasis naturally is on their early 
reading and on that done just prior to and during the height 
of the transcendental period. Oftentimes, however, their 
later studies are not without significance, and all reference to 
them has not been excluded. To throw light on this main 
discussion, and for the purpose of indicating briefly the rela- 
tion of these men to the streams of tendency treated in Chap- 
ter I, there is prefixed to the account of each man's studies a 
paragraph or two concerning his early environment, especially 
the religious atmosphere within which he grew up. These 
sections will serve to show how far each came in contact with 
the Calvinistic spirit, and how far, negatively, that spirit was 
thus a stimulus to his activity. The influence of the transcen- 
dentalists on one another was, of course, great, through their 
conversation, their letters, their writings, and in many subtler 
ways. Especially pronounced was that of Dr. Channing. 
Doubtless they themselves would have been unable to tell just 
how much they owed to this source or to that. There are to 
be found in fact, in this connection, more than one pair of 
externally contradictory statements. Some incidental treatment 
of this matter of mutual influence will be made in the course 
of the chapter. 

42 



43 
Channing 1 



The early religious environment of William Ellery Channing 
was Puritanical ; Calvinistic, yet not illiberal. Both of his 
parents were orthodox in belief but tolerant in spirit. His 
father — who died when Channing was only twelve — was a 
man of high moral character, amiable and even temper, and 
engaging and affectionate manners. His attitude toward his 
children was, however, in accordance with the custom of the 
time, somewhat distant and austere. Channing's mother 2 was 
a woman who seems to have combined in a remarkable way 
traits of tenderness and severity. She had abundant common- 
sense and practical capacity, as well as a keen sense of humor, 
but above all an unfailing sincerity, and firmness in truth and 

1 William Ellery Channing (for the importance given to Channing in 
this stuHy^ see p. 27) was born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1780. 
His father, William Channing, was a graduate of Princeton College, 
ancT~a lawyer of considerable eminence. The son went to school in 
Newport until he was twelve, when he was sent to the home of his 
uncle in New London, Connecticut, under whom he prepared for college. 
He entered Harvard in 1794 and graduated four years later. Then for 
over a year he was tutor in the family of David Meade Randolph in 
Richmond, Virginia. This experience bred in him an extreme hatred 
for slavery. It was during this time too that by foolishly ascetic habits 
he permanently undermined his health. On his return from the South 
he began the study of theology, first at home, then in Cambridge, and 
in 1803 he became the minister of the Federal Street Society, Boston. 
This was his only pastorate, and he held it for nearly forty years. In 
1814 Channing married his cousin, Ruth Gibbs. In 1822 and 1823 he 
traveled abroad for his health for more than a year, meeting, among 
other eminent men, Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the years 1825-1830 
he wrote those articles, especially the essays on Milton, Fenelon, and 
Napoleon, which gained for him a considerable European fame (for 
his influence in France, see Renan's fttudes L'Histoire Religieuse, 361). 
In 1830 he took another trip in search of health, this time to the West 
Indies. Increasingly during the latter part of his life, his interest turned 
toward the questions of politics and social reform then being agitated. 
In 1835 he published his book on slavery; after this his part in the 
anti-slavery contest was prominent and courageous, though never ex- 
tremely radical. He died in 1842. 

2 For a description of her by her son, see Channing, 9. 



44 

principle. The son may be said to have inherited both a 
vigorous and a delicately sensitive constitution. 

The way in which the atmosphere and sterner doctrines of 
Calvinism shocked this sensitive nature is well brought out 
in various anecdotes and reminiscences of Channing's youth, 
as, for instance, his description of Dr. Hopkins, exponent of 
the Hopkinsonian form of Calvinism, whose preaching he heard 
as a child and w T ho was a frequent guest at his father's table : 
" My recollections of Dr. Hopkins go back to my earliest 
years. . . . Perhaps he was the first minister I heard, but I 
heard him with no profit. His manner, which was singularly 
unattractive, could not win a child's attention ; and the circum- 
stances attending the service were repulsive. The church . . . 
was literally ' as cold as a barn ' and some of the most painful 
sensations of my childhood were experienced in that comfort- 
less building." 1 But the most familiar as well as the most 
illuminating anecdote is the one telling the mingled feelings 
of awe and despair with which, after listening to a sermon of 
the extreme Calvinistic type, the boy heard his father pro- 
nounce it " sound doctrine," and then his utter astonishment 
at beholding that same father return home undismayed and 
calmly resume the common round of life. " Could what he 
had heard be true? No! his father did not believe it; people 
did not believe it ! It was not true ! " 2 

During Channing's college days — owing largely, we must 
believe, to skeptical influences in the air, born of the French 
Revolution — his early attitude of revolt was strengthened, and 
his seeking for intellectual independence encouraged. It was 
then that his real consecration came to the work of the Chris- 
tian ministry. He writes : " In my senior year, the prevalence 
of infidelity, imported from France, led me to inquire into the 
evidences of Christianity, and then / found for what I was 
made. My heart embraced its great objects with an interest 
which has been increasing to this hour." 3 With this new 
devotion of himself to the religious life, Channing retained, 

l Ibid., 15. 

Ibid., 16. 
Ibid., 39. 



45 

confirmed and re-enforced, his early feelings against the darker 
parts of Calvinism, especially against the doctrine of total de- 
pravity; and through his writings passage after passage 1 may 
be found showing the intensity of his aversion — an aversion 
which he describes as " a horror which we want words to 
express " — toward a teaching which he believed dishonored 
God and degraded human nature. 2 

II 

While in college, the study of three, or possibly four authors 
seems to have had special influence on Channing. He " read 
the Stoics with delight," also Locke, Berkeley, Reid, Hume, 3 
and Priestley. 4 But these were not the writers from whom 
he took the most. " Only three books that I read at that 
time were of any moment to me : one was Ferguson on ' Civil 
Society/ one Hutcheson's ' Moral Philosophy ' and one was 
Dr. Price's ' Dissertations.' " 5 One day after reading Hutche- 
son, and under the stimulation of his thought, there came to 
Channing, in the form of a vivid spiritual experience, an 
intuition that forever after dominated his thinking, the idea of 
the dignity of human nature, of the beauty of disinterested love, 
of the significance of man's position in an order of eternal 

1 As fully and as well brought out as anywhere in the Discourse at the 
Ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks, Works, iii, 85. See also Channing, 
185, and Works, iv, 61. 

2 Under these circumstances his admiration for the genius of Jonathan 
Edwards {Works, v, 303) does credit to his liberality and breadth of 
view. See also his tribute to the greatness of Hopkins in his sermon 
on Christian Worship, and in Note B appended to that discourse, Works, 
iv, 303. 

3 See Channing, 55, and touching Hume's argument on miracles, Works, 
iii, 115. 

4 In 1841 he wrote: "With Dr. Priestley, a good and great man, who 
had most to do in producing the late Unitarian movement, I have less 
sympathy than with many of the ' orthodox.' ... I am little of a Uni- 
tarian, have little sympathy with the system of Priestley and Belsham, 
and stand aloof from all but those who strive and pray for clearer light, 
who look for a purer and more effectual manifestation of Christian 
truth." — Channing, 427. 

5 Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 368. 



46 

progression, and of the endless possibilities of his growth. In 
the reading of Ferguson he found and appropriated in his own 
way this same idea as applied to society, the whole conception 
of social progress. The writer who seems most to have in- 
fluenced his strictly metaphysical thinking was Dr. Price. In 
1840, when he was reading Jouffroy, Channing said : 

" I have found here a fact which interests me personally 
very much. Jouffroy says that Dr. Price's Dissertations were 
translated into German at the time of their first appearance, 
and produced a much greater impression there than they did 
in England; and he thinks they were the first movers of the 
German mind in the transcendental direction. Now, I read 
Price when I was in college. Price saved me from Locke's 
Philosophy. He gave me the doctrine of ideas, and during 
my life I have written the words Love, Right, etc., with a 
capital. His book, probably, moulded my philosophy into the 
form it has always retained, and opened my mind into the 
transcendental depth. And I have always found in the ac- 
counts I have read of German philosophy in Madame de Stael, 
and in these later times, that it was cognate to my own. I 
cannot say that I have ever received a new idea from it; and 
the cause is obvious, if Price was alike the father of it and of 
mine" 1 

This — whatever Hume and Kant would think of Jouffroy's 
historical criticism — is interesting as containing the avowal by 
Channing that his philosophy was transcendental, that he did 
not get it directly from the Germans, and indeed that in 1840 he 
had never read their works. In the case of these three writers, 
Hutcheson, Ferguson, and Price, though there is no proof, it 
seems decidedly reasonable and probable that they served more 
to unlock latent tendencies in Channing's own nature than to 
transfer to his mind in any significant measure the detailed 
content of their own teachings. 

A fourth writer whose influence on Channing was consider- 
able was Shakespeare. There was, during the years when he 
was in college, a renascence of interest at Harvard in the 

1 Channing, 34, and Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 369. 



47 

great dramatist, 1 and later in life when speaking of Words- 
worth's Excursion he declared that he " never read anything 
but Shakespeare more." 2 

Channing's studies and reflections while in Virginia 3 had 
deep influence on the course of his later development, and we 
may well agree with him in characterizing this period as " per- 
haps the most eventful " of his life. " I lived alone," he says, 
"too poor to buy books, spending my days and nights in an 
outbuilding, with no one beneath my roof except during the 
hours of schoolkeeping. . . . With not a human being to 
whom I could communicate my deepest thoughts and feelings, 
and shrinking from common society, I passed through intel- 
lectual and moral conflicts, through excitements of heart and 
mind, so absorbing as often to banish sleep, and to destroy 
almost wholly the power of digestion. I was worn well-nigh 
to a skeleton. Yet I look back on those days and nights of 
loneliness and frequent gloom with thankfulness." 

Though his reading at this time was varied, including among 
other subjects a good deal of history, it is abundantly clear 
from his letters that his greatest inspiration was from writers 
whose ideas were of French Revolutionary kinship. In them 
he found confirmation of the views he had already begun to 
accept, for what appealed to him most was their trust in human 
nature and their hope for a state of social perfection. He 
reads Mrs. Wollstonecraft and pronounces her the greatest 
woman of the age ; he reads Rousseau's Eloise and exclaims, 
" What a writer ! Rousseau is the only French author I have 
ever read, who knows the way to the heart ; " Godwin, too, he 
dips into with admiration, recommending to his friend Shaw, 
Caleb Williams. Just what he got from this one or from that 
cannot be said, but the general, if not the specific, source of 
his thinking is perfectly clear when we find him writing, " I 
derive my sentiments from the nature of man," or declaring 
his belief that it is necessary " to destroy all distinctions of 

1 See Memoirs of the Buckminsters, 92. 

2 Channing, 276. 

3 All the quotations in this and the following paragraph are from 
Chapter iv, Channing. 



48 

property . . . and to throw the produce of their [man- 
kind's] labor into one common stock, instead of hoarding it 
up in their own garners." " You must convince mankind," 
he continues, " that they themselves, and all which they possess, 
are but parts of a great whole; that they are bound by God, 
their common Father, to labor for the good of this great whole. 
. . . Mine and thine must be discarded from his [man's] 
vocabulary. He should call everything ours." Channing's 
native philanthropic tendencies were kindled by this conception 
to such intensity that his exhortations to his friends at the 
North would be laughable, were they not so sincere : " Rouse, 
then ! " he cries out, " . . . we will beat down with the 
irresistible engines of truth those strong ramparts consolidated 
by time, within which avarice, ignorance, and selfishness have 
intrenched themselves." It is no wonder that his friends began 
to fear that in his Virginia environment he had been converted 
to Jacobinism, or that his brother wrote him, expressing appre- 
hension lest he had become one of the " Illuminati." But Chan- 
ning was, in reality, far enough from any such alliances. He 
remained both Federalist and Christian, and apparently found 
no difficulty in fusing his new views with his old. He indulged 
in the "melancholy reflection," to be sure, that so many of 
the writers whom he admired were deists, but for his own part 
he practically identified the Revolutionary doctrine of Fra- 
ternity with the Christian doctrine of love, and made at this 
time a new and deeper consecration of himself to the cause of 
Christianity. 

On returning to Newport he plunged into his theological 
studies, making use, in this connection, of the Redwood 
Library, " a collection of books, extremely rare and valuable 
for the time." His preparation for the ministry was con- 
tinued at Harvard. During these years, in addition to some 
of the men already mentioned, he seems to have been in- 
fluenced to some extent by the writings of William Law, 1 by 
Butler's Sermons on Human Nature, and — both positively and 
negatively— by the works of Jonathan Edwards, whom later 
he called the " intensest thinker of the new world." 2 

l lbid., 87. 

2 Works, v, 303. 



49 

And now a word as to other somewhat later literary and 
philosophical influences. 

If frequency of allusion affords any criterion, the perusal 
of Miss Peabody's Reminiscences of Channing would lead one 
to infer that during all the latter part of his life, Coleridge and 
Wordsworth were the most important influences of this kind 
on Channing. He speaks enthusiastically to Miss Peabody 
of Wordsworth's genius, 1 and reads to her frequently from 
his writings ; 2 we find them together searching his works for 
all examples of a certain thought, 3 and hear of a copy of his 
poems "that lay on the table." 4 The references to Coleridge 
are hardly less frequent. Channing it was who first directed 
Miss Peabody's attention to Coleridge (from the latter she 
learned the meaning of transcendental 5 ), lending her the 
Friend, and reading to her from his writings. 6 The whole 
impression which one gets is that Wordsworth and Coleridge 
were scarcely less than Channing's constant companions. " In 
the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth," he says, " I find 
a theology more spiritual than in the controversial writings 
of either Unitarians or Trinitarians." 7 He speaks of the Lake 
poets as being the prophets of a new moral world, 8 and of 
" the great poet of our times, Wordsworth, one of the few 
who are to live." 9 Of Wordsworth, says his nephew, "he 
always spoke with the most respectful affection, as of a bene- 
factor by whom he felt that his heart and mind had been 
equally enriched. Shortly after the ' Excursion ' appeared, 
he obtained a copy of it, which was sent over by a London 
house to a publisher who knew little of its worth. . - . . But 

1 Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 158. 

2 For a discussion of the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, 
Ibid., 127. 

*Ibid., 188. 
* Ibid., 134. 

5 Ibid., 364. 

6 Ibid., 72. 

7 Ibid., 72. 

8 Ibid., 80. 

9 Works, vi, 155. See this same passage also for a reference to 
Dickens. 

5 



50 

to Channing it came like a revelation. He kept it constantly 
by him ; and, as he once said, had ' never read anything but 
Shakespeare more.' "* The meeting of Channing and Words- 
worth when the former went to England gave great mutual 
delight; Wordsworth read to him from The Prelude, 2 and 
Channing characterized himself at that time as one who pro- 
fessed " to be greatly in debt to Mr. Wordsworth's genius." 3 
To the influence of Coleridge Channing also expressed his 
obligations, declaring that to him he " owed more than to 
the mind of any other philosophic thinker,"* and that the 
Biographia Literaria supplied the " wants left by the study 
of Locke," — statements which are probably only superficially 
inconsistent with those already quoted about Dr. Price. 
Coleridge, as well as Wordsworth, Channing met when abroad, 5 
and he had the pleasure of listening to one of the famous 
monologues, 6 in part at least an exposition of the Trinity. 7 
Coleridge requested his visitor to read his essays on " Method." 

Among other English writers of the day, Channing took 
delight in Shelley, speaking of him as " a seraph gone astray " ; 8 
while concerning Carlyle this is, perhaps, sufficient: "When 
the ' Sartor Resartus ' was put into his hands, he said to me 
that he scarce ever was so completely taken out of himself. 
' Certainly it gave me no new idea, but it was a perfect quick- 
ener of all my ideas.' " 9 

Of French writers Madame de Stael and Cousin had prob- 
ably as much effect, in his later life, as any. We find Miss 
Peabody reading 10 to him Cousin's Introduction to Philosophy, lx 

1 Channing, 275. 

2 Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 81. 

3 Channing, 342. 

4 Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 75. 

5 Channing, 343. 

* Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 76. 

7 Ibid., 70. Channing said afterward: "I have no objection to the 
formula of the Trinity as Coleridge explained it." Ibid., 441. 
8 Ibid., 339. 
9 Ibid., 370. 

10 Ibid., 351; and see also 9. 

11 For Channing's interest in and knowledge of the history of philos- 
ophy, see Ibid., 140. ^yo - 3 1 1 



cs 



1 -,-f v° 



. \ 






^ D 51 tfyS- 



his Examination of Locke, and his Plato. Indeed Channing 
seems to have known Plato mainly if not entirely through 
Cousin's translation, and he dwells with satisfaction on the 
kinship which he finds between the Greek philosopher's and 
the Christian view of the world. 1 

It was through Madame de Stael's Germany that his in- 
terest was aroused in German philosophy f and though we 
have heard his declaration that he probably never " received 
a new idea from it," the following may be quoted from his 
nephew's statement : 

" It was with intense delight that he made acquaintance with 
the master minds of Germany, through the medium, first, of 
Madame de Stael, and afterward of Coleridge. He recognized 
in them his leaders. In Kant's doctrine of the Reason he 
found confirmation of the views which, in early years received 
from Price, had quickened him to ever deeper reverence of 
the essential powers of man. To Schelling's sublime intima- 
tions of the Divine Life everywhere manifested through nature 
and humanity, his heart, devoutly conscious of the universal 
agency of God, gladly responded. But above all did the 
heroic stoicism of Fichte charm him by its full assertion of 
the grandeur of the human will." 3 

Richter, Schiller, and Goethe were also among Channing's 
acquaintances ; 4 and Margaret Fuller read Herder to him, and 
German theological criticism. 

Finally, deserving at least of mention 5 are the facts of his 
contact with Quakerism, 6 and of his having read, about 1820, ^ 
a manuscript essay of the Swedenborgian, Sampson Reed, 7 

1 Ibid., 175. 

2 Ibid., 76. 

3 Channing, 275, 

* Chadwick, 207. For Channing's condemnation of Goethe for lack 
of morals, see Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 337. 

5 Channing's correspondence with Miss Aikin does not reveal much 
about his studies. He was apparently reading, among others, Hallam, 
Berkeley, Priestley, Mackintosh, Scott, Lake Poets, Hartley, Milman, 
and French philosophers. 

6 Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 310; also 108 and 191. 
ilbid., 186. 



52 

and later the same author's The Growth of the Mind, the book 
that Emerson so highly commended. Swedenborg himself 1 
Channing did not read. 

Alcott 2 



Alcott's parents were both Episcopalians. His father, in 
the words of Mr. Sanborn, " was a diffident, retiring man, and 
kept much at home, content with his simple lot, industrious, 
temperate, conscientious, honorable in all his dealing, and fortu- 

1 Ibid., preface, iv, and 185. 

2 Amos Bronson Alcott was born in Wolcott, Connecticut, in 1799. 
His father, Joseph Chatfield Alcox (Alcott changed the spelling of the 
name), was a farmer and mechanic, and from early youth Bronson was 
accustomed to work on the farm. At the age of six he began going 
to the common school, and until he was ten he attended nine months a 
year. In 181 3 he studied at the home of his uncle, Dr. Bronson, and in 
181 5 for three months in the school of Mr. Keys, the minister of the 
parish. For a time he thought of entering Yale College, but, mainly 
because his father could not afford the expense of such an education, he 
gave up this plan and went to the South, hoping to find a position as a 
teacher. Peddling, however, proved both more feasible and more re- 
munerative than teaching, and he spent most of the next five years selling 
wares in Virginia and the Carolinas. His success financially was varied, 
but for the whole period, owing to illness and extravagance, was small. 
In 1825 he obtained the position of master in the village school at 
Cheshire, Connecticut. Common schools in the neighborhood had fallen 
into neglect. Alcott accordingly resolved on reform, and during his 
stay of two years at Cheshire, by the originality and success of his 
teaching, he attracted considerable attention. He anticipated, to a 
degree, kindergarten methods now in vogue, methods which later earned 
him the title of the American Pestalozzi. It was through the modest 
fame of his school that he made the acquaintance of Rev. S. J. May, 
whose daughter he married in 1830. After leaving Cheshire, Alcott 
taught for a time in Bristol, and then, over a period of more than ten 
years, in various schools in Boston and Philadelphia, where he carried 
out and further developed his radical educational theories. In 1834 he 
opened in Boston his " Temple School," the last and most famous of 
his children's schools. At first it flourished, having at one time as many 
as forty pupils, but various causes (see below, p. 154) operated to 
impair its prosperity and finally in 1839 it was given up. After this 
Alcott first tried his scheme of public " conversations." In 1840 he 



53 

nate in his domestic life." 1 His mother was a woman of 
sweet and kindly disposition, to whose beneficent influence 
on his life her son paid more than one tribute. He owed her, 
he declared, not a little of his " serenity of mind, equanimity 
of disposition, hope and trust in the future." 2 It was the 
special wish of his mother that he should take orders in the 
church, and for a time he thought of entering Yale College. 
He relinquished this plan, however, and spent four or five years 
of his early manhood as a pedlar in the South. This period 
of his life brought him rich experience. He seems, under 
the influence of the society around him, to have yielded to the 
temptation to spend money lavishly on himself (especially for 
fine clothes), and to have indulged in the dream of living the 
life of ease and luxury which he saw being led by a certain 
class of idle Southern gentlemen. But having gone too far in 
his spendthrift habits he at length came to his senses. He 
wrote to his brother in 1822, " I have seen the folly of my 
past extravagance, and hope you will take timely warning 
by my example. A young man at twenty-three should have 
learned his lesson at less cost than I have." 3 At the end of 
these years in the South, Alcott came in contact with the 
Quakers of North Carolina, and this experience seems to have 

moved with his family to Concord and there for a time made an endeavor 
to stick to farm work, but his interest in the thought-currents of the 
day was too strong, and he again began holding conversations and giving 
lectures. Sailing in 1842, he spent most of a year in England. On his 
return he and his family removed to a farm in the town of Harvard, 
Massachusetts, where with two English friends they instituted the small 
community of " Fruitlands." This soon proved a failure, and after a 
short stay at Still River, the Alcotts returned to Concord. There, and 
later in Boston, they struggled against poverty, until finally the second 
of the daughters, Louisa May, gained literary success and freed her 
parents from financial embarrassment. Alcott continued his conversa- 
tions and lectures, and in his later years saw realized, in the Concord 
School of Philosophy, the long cherished dream of his life. He died 
in 1888. 

1 Sanborn, 8. 

2 Ibid., 20. 

3 Sanborn, 57. 



54 

had an important influence on his later development. 1 At 
any rate, from about this time his views of life assumed a 
much higher and more serious form. In March- April, 1823, 
he records, " The moral sentiment now supersedes peddling, 
clearly and finally." 2 

Travel is ever an enemy of provincial and traditional opin- 
ion and so a mother of philosophy ; and to the total experience 
of this period in the South — we have dwelt on it here for this 
reason — must be attributed in no small degree the liberal and 
radical tendencies which Alcott exhibited on his return to 
New England. It was lack of orthodoxy more than anything 
else, apparently, that led to the giving up of his first school at 
Cheshire, Connecticut. When we read the following passage 
in his diary for June 10, 1827, we realize at once that among 
those who still held tenaciously to religion Alcott was an Amer- 
ican pioneer in extreme theological radicalism — though the 
entry is given here, not for its positive significance but in order 
to show some of the beliefs against which he was revolting : 

" I cannot but regard the popular doctrine of the Atonement 
by Jesus Christ as erroneous, — taking its rise from the uncer- 
tainty and obscurity of its history, and the fondness of the 
human mind to support as sacred, in matters relating to theol- 
ogy, whatever deviates from the ordinary course of human 
action. . . . Those who at the present day idolize the person 
of Jesus Christ, asserting him to be God, exhibit the disposition 
of man in ancient times to deify such of their fellow-men as 
performed great and magnanimous actions. Having little con- 
ception of the human mind, and the adaptation of mental causes 
to mental effects, they are at a loss to account for such actions 
upon any other supposition than divine agency. ... I hold 
that the Christian religion is the best yet promulgated, but do 
not thence infer that it is not susceptible of improvement; nor 
do I wish to confound its doctrines with its founder, and to 
worship one of my fellow-beings. If my sentiments are 

1 How great this was, forms an interesting subject of speculation, 
especially since the Quaker doctrine of " Inner Light " is essentially 
transcendental. 

2 Sanborn, 59. 



55 

erroneous, I ardently desire to be conducted to truth, wherever 
it may lead." 1 

The following, written very much later in life, shows some- 
thing of his feeling toward the older religion and theology 2 of 
New England : " Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance 
to descendants. Not every one of the present generation were 
[sic] so fortunate as to inherit a liberal and humane one. I, 
for my part, while acknowledging gratefully my indebtedness 
to whatsoever was humane and holy in the Puritan creed, have 
wished it had bequeathed to us some gleams of Jove's smiling 
Olympus to soften the terrors of its blazing Sinai. . . . Nor 
can it be denied that, dreary and doleful as it was, it has borne 
fruits that any faith might honor, has planted institutions still 
in advance of all others in our modern civilization, has nurtured 
heroic qualities of character, if not the gentler ones." 3 

II 

Bronson Alcott early became a lover of books, and his 
mother, he tells us, encouraged his reading habits. Among 
the books of his youth were the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, 
Hervey's Meditations, Young's Night Thoughts, Burgh's Dig- 
nity of Human Nature, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, and 
Thomson's Seasons. 4 The Pilgrim's Progress he made a 
habit of reading through once a year, " and this book more 
than any other," says Mr. Sanborn, " gave direction to his 
fancies and visions of life." 

That Alcott's studies were not wholly neglected during his 
sojourn in the South is shown by entries in his autobiography. 
The following were written while he was among the Quakers 
of North Carolina: 

" March and April, 1823. Have a good deal of intercourse 
with Friends in Chowan and Perquimans Counties. Read 

1 Sanborn, 98. 

3 His remarks in 1828 (Ibid., 121) on a ritualistic Episcopalian service, 
and on a Calvinistic sermon by Dr. Lyman Beecher, show how his na- 
ture was revolting from the traditional forms and theology. 

3 Table Talk, 101. 

4 Sanborn, 16-17. 



56 

Penn's ' No Cross, No Crown/ Barclay's Apology, Fox's 
' Journal,' Clarkson's ' Portraiture of Quakerism,' William 
Law's ' Devout Call,' and other serious books of like spirit. 
Copy passages into my diary. The moral sentiment now 
supersedes peddling, clearly and finally." 1 

" May. ... I read Cowper's Poems, Hervey's Meditations, 
and the New Testament." 

In 1827, after his return to the North, he writes of having 
read among other things, " Edgeworth's Practical Education, 
Dwight's Theology, Miller's Retrospect, Kitt's Elements, 
Reed [sic], Stewart and Locke on the Philosophy of Mind, 
Watts' Logic, etc. ;" 2 while among the books bought for his 
Cheshire school library are " the works of Miss Edgeworth, 
Pilgrim's Progress, many books of travels, Adam Smith's 
Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Locke on the Understanding, 
Watts on the Mind, Cogan's Treatise on the Passions, 
Browne's Philosophy of the Human Mind, the newly estab- 
lished Journal of Education." 3 

Alcott opened his school in Philadelphia in 1831, and it was 
while there that he seems to have done a particularly large 
amount of reading and to have become acquainted with writ- 
ers of the transcendental type. His studies appear to have 
been predominantly philosophical and to have afforded meta- 
physical sanction for those views of education and life that he 
had already begun to form. He read " more or less of Aris- 
totle, Plato, Bacon, Sir James Mackintosh, Brougham, Car- 
lyle, Cogan, Bulwer's novels, Shelley's poetry, Sismondi, 
De Gerando, George Combe, and innumerable works on edu- 
cation, morals, and religion." 4 

It was at this time that he became personally acquainted 
with Dr. Channing. In his diary for 1833 he writes: 

" I have seen Dr. Channing several times. Our conversa- 
tions have chiefly turned on intellectual subjects — Coleridge's 
character and writings, Sir James Mackintosh, Bentham, 

1 Ibid., 59. 

2 Ibid., 73. 

3 Ibid., 75. 

4 Sanborn, 165. 



Early Education, Slavery, etc. His views are marked by a 
deep philanthropic spirit and a philosophic tendency. . . . On 
most topics connected with the nature, duties, and destiny of 
man, our opinions are analogous. They are the fruits of the 
same school of philosophy, a union of the Christian with the 
Platonic. He is, I conceive, the greatest man of his age. His 
mind is more purely philosophic than that of any other Amer- 
ican divine; his speculations more profound and generous. 
His views are universal; they embody the infinite and spirit- 
ual. His heart has sympathized more deeply with his race 
than often happens to the philosophic genius, and the fruits 
of that genius will form a part of literature to remain in the 
treasury of America, long after he shall have departed. An- 
other age will understand and adopt his views." 1 

This is but one of a number of appreciations of Channing, 
and as late as 1835, in a list of " prophets of the present time " 
arranged " according to their apprehension of the spiritual 
ideal," Alcott places Channing first and Emerson third, though 
a little later, of course, Emerson would have been given the 
first place. The seven line octave of one of Alcott's sonnets 
well sums up the influence of Channing on him: 

" Channing ! my Mentor whilst my thought was young, 
And I the votary of fair liberty, — ■ 
How hung I then upon thy glowing tongue, 
And thought of love and truth as one with thee ! 
Thou wast the inspirer of a noble life, 
When I with error waged unequal strife 
And from its coils thy teaching set me free." 2 

A list of readings from his diary in 1835 (he was then in 
Boston) includes Plato, Coleridge, Hesiod, Boethius, Sartor 
Resartus. 3 And the following, written in the same year, 
should be quoted, not merely for what is said of Plato but for 
the interesting reference to natural science, and as showing, 
too, how early Alcott had appropriated the main elements of 
his later philosophy, especially his doctrines of pre-existence 
and of the creation of finite things by lapse from perfection: 

1 lbid., 168. 

2 Cooke, Poets of Transcendentalism, 59. 

3 Genius and Character of Emerson, 42. 



58 

" My own conceptions of life are confirmed in the happiest 
manner in the Platonic theory. In Plato, as in Jesus, do I 
find the Light of the World, even the super sensual light, that 
lighteth every man who cometh into the world of sense, and 
essayeth to regain that spirit it seemeth to have lost by the 
incarnation of itself. The true study of man is man. When 
this is felt as it ought to be, natural science will receive an 
impulse that we cannot at present conceive of. Then we shall 
begin at the beginning, and not, as now, at the end ; we shall 
trace things in the order of their production, see them in the 
process of formation, growth, consummation, — the only true 
way of apprehending them, the method of philosophy. With- 
out this method all our boasted acquisitions are fragments. 
... As Man is my study, — universal as well as individual 
man, — man in his elements, embracing views of him in all 
stages of his career, — in his pre-existent life, his infancy, child- 
hood, youth, manhood, decline, resumption -in God, — so doth 
all Nature, in its manifold relation, present innumerable topics 
for consideration, as the framework and emblem of this same 
Being. Man, the Incarnate Spirit; God, the Absolute Spirit; 
Creation, the emblem of these two, — such are my topics of 
speculation and inquiry." 1 

And a little later in the same year, September 2J, 1835, ne 
writes in his diary: 

" In 1833 I was a disciple of Experience, trying to bring 
my theories within the Baconian method of Induction, and 
took the philosophy of Aristotle as the exponent of humanity, 
while my heart was even then lingering around the theories of 
Plato, without being conscious of it. A follower of Aristotle 
was I in theory, yet a true Platonist in practice. . V . I was 
looking outward for the origin of the human powers, making 
more of phenomena than I ought ; studying the concrete, with- 
out a sense of the grounds on which this was dependent for its 
form and continuance. It was Coleridge that lifted me out 
of this difficulty. The perusal of the ' Aids to Reflection/ the 
' Friend,' and the ' Biographia Literaria ' at this time gave 
my mind a turn towards the spiritual. I was led deeper to 

1 lbid., 42. 



59 

seek the grounds even of experience, and found the elements 
of human consciousness not in the impressions of external na- 
ture, but in the spontaneous life of Spirit itself, independent 
of experience in space and time. Thus was I relieved from 
the philosophy of sense. Since that time I have been steadily 
pursuing the light thus let in upon me, and striving to appre- 
hend, represent, and embody it, not only in theory but in 
practice." 1 

Mr. Harris, in his essay on Alcott's philosophy, suggests 
that it may have been some of Coleridge's quotations from 
Boehme and Plotinus that touched especially the chord of 
sympathy in Alcott. His nature and the subsequent develop- 
ment of his thought lend reasonableness to this view. At any 
rate he soon seems to have become interested in the mystical 
thinkers, and his philosophy rapidly assumed the form which 
was to be embodied in the Orphic Sayings of the Dial, and 
which he retained, 2 in its more fundamental principles un- 
changed, for the rest of his life. This fact renders quotations 
and inferences from some of his later publications more indi- 
cative of his earlier sources than they otherwise could be 
trusted to be. 

The writers whom he seemed to enjoy the most, whom he 
found richest in suggestion, and with whom his own thought 
appears most in accord, were men like Pythagoras, 3 Plato, 
Jamblicus, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Boehme, Swedenborg: 
on the whole thinkers whose systems were predominantly 
Platonic, Neo-Platonic, or mystical. 4 His statement that " if 
Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Socrates, Behmen, Swedenborg, were 
to meet in this town, he should not be ashamed, but should 
be free of that company " 5 shows the type of mind with which 
he considered himself most in sympathy. 

Among ancient thinkers, Plato he considered " pre-eminent 
in breadth and beauty of speculation," 6 and his admiration of 

1 Ibid., 47. 

2 Sanborn, 634. (Mr. Harris's essay.) 

3 Ibid., 400. 

4 See the whole of Mr. Harris's essay in the Sanborn-Harris biography. 

5 Ibid., 426. 

6 Concord Days, 230. See also The Genius and Character of Emer- 
son, 42. 



60 

the Academic philosophy was so great that Emerson was ac- 
customed to speak of him as " Plato's reader." Pythagoras, 
too, Alcott esteemed highly, declaring that of the educators of 
antiquity he was " the most eminent and successful." 1 The 
life of Pythagoras by Jamblicus was Alcott's favorite book ; 2 
he speaks of its author as an " admiring disciple, and a phi- 
losopher worthy of his master." 3 

Plotinus, and the other Neo-Platonists, Alcott read in the 
translations of Thomas Taylor. His ranking of Plotinus is 
conveyed when he speaks of Jacob Boehme as having " exer- 
cised a deeper influence on the progress of thought than anyone 
since Plotinus," 4 while Boehme himself he characterizes as 
"the subtilest thinker on Genesis since Moses," 5 and it was 
from him that he derived his doctrine of temperaments. 6 Of 
Swedenborg Alcott's knowledge seems to have been consider- 
able, and his studies in this mystic were probably directly 
effective in inducing some of his own states of " illumination " 
to which reference will later be made. 7 

Beyond what he got from Coleridge it does not appear that 
Alcott, in his earlier years, went deeply into German philosophy, 
though later his knowledge and admiration of it were in- 
creased ; 8 he never studied it, however, in the original, for he 
" read no language but his own and a little French." 9 

Among British philosophers, Berkeley, as might be expected, 
he singles out for especial praise, calling him England's " finest 
thinker since Bacon," 10 and declaring that " his claim to the 
name of metaphysician transcends those of most 11 of his 
countrymen." 12 

1 Concord Days, 88. 

2 Sanborn, 641. 

3 Concord Days, 88. 

4 Concord Days, 237. 

5 Tablets, 189. 

6 Sanborn, 628. He read Boehme in the translation of William Law. 

7 Page 129. 

8 Sanborn, 552-558. 

9 Sanborn, The Personality of Emerson, 69. 

10 Concord Days, 152. 

11 The following from Concord Days is interesting and not at all 
surprising : " Nothing profound nor absolute can be expected from 
minds of the type of Mill, Herbert Spencer, and the rest." 

12 Concord Days, 236. 



61 

Coleridge, whose influence on Alcott has already been men- 
tioned, he finds " the most stimulating of modern British 
thinkers," 1 and of him and Wordsworth he says that he re- 
calls no other writer since Milton " whose works require a 
serene and thoughtful spirit, in order to be understood. " Al- 
cott's admiration of Wordsworth's ode on the Intimations of 
Immortality 2 is unbounded, and he quotes it over and over; 
of his literal application of it in his school teaching we shall 
have occasion to speak later on. Outside Wordsworth, and 
perhaps Milton, his taste in poetry is best represented by such 
names as Donne, Vaughan, Crashaw, Herbert, Quarles, and 
Cowley. 

Even this short survey of Alcott's reading makes it possible 
to assert with some confidence that the men to whom he devotes 
separate sections in Concord Days include many, if not most 
of his masters — Pythagoras, Plotinus, Goethe, Carlyle, Plato, 
Socrates, Berkeley, Boehme, Coleridge ; while a short list of 
some of the writers whom he quotes or refers to most fre- 
quently is equally in harmony with what we have already ob- 
served (those who appear most frequently are put first) : 
Plato, Coleridge, Evelyn, Goethe, Aristotle, Plutarch, Words- i 
worth, Pythagoras, Berkeley, Glanvill, Montaigne, Milton, 
St. Augustine, Herrick, Plotinus, Proclus, Marcus Aurelius, 
Bhagavad Gita, Fuller, Henry More, William Law, Bacon, and 
Jacobi. With this list we may conclude our discussion of 
Alcott's studies, merely remarking, finally, that his general 
views on books and their function are nearly identical with 
Emerson's. " As with friends," so in the case of books, he 
says, a man " may dispense with a wide acquaintance. Few 
and choice. The richest minds need not large libraries. . . . 
I confess to being drawn rather to the antiques, and turn with 
a livelier expectancy the dingy leaves, ... I value books for 
their suggestiveness even more than for the information they 
may contain, works that may be taken in hand and laid aside, 
read at moments." 3 It is partly a result of this literary creed, 

1 Concord Days, 246; see also Ibid., 136. 

2 Sanborn, 199; Concord Days, 108; Table Talk, 57. For the analysis 
of the ode in his school, see Miss Peabody's Record of a School, 144. 

3 Table Talk, 5. 



62 

doubtless, partly owing to the native cast of his mind and the 
circumstances of his education that the reader of Alcott's 
works is inevitably left with the impression that his studies 
were conspicuously lacking in continuity and thoroughness, 
and his knowledge almost wholly without that quality which 
he, perhaps, considered its distinguishing feature — correlation. 

Emerson 1 



Emerson came of the best New England stock, and on the 
paternal side was descended from a long line of Puritan clergy- 

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. His father, 
Rev. William Emerson, minister of the First Church, died early, and as 
a result the life of the Emerson family was for a number of years a 
struggle against poverty. There were four other sons beside Ralph 
Waldo, two of whom, Edward and Charles, young men of exceptional 
promise, died of consumption. Emerson received his early training at 
the grammar and Latin schools and at home under the supervision of his 
aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. He entered Harvard in 181 7, and gradu- 
ated, without taking conspicuous rank, four years later. On leaving 
college, after a short experience in school-teaching, he began the study 
of divinity, and was ordained in March, 1829, becoming assistant pastor 
and soon after pastor of the Second Church, Boston. In September of 
the same year he was married to Miss Ellen Tucker. She died soon 
after of consumption. In 1832 he resigned his pastorate, mainly on 
account of a difference of opinion which arose over the question of 
administering the Lord's Supper. In 1833 he went abroad, traveling 
in Sicily, Italy, France, and finally in England, where he met, among 
other eminent men, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. He returned 
to America in the fall of 1833 and the next summer began his residence 
in Concord. In 1835 Emerson was married to Miss Lydia Jackson. 
Already, before this, he had begun turning his attention to writing and 
lecturing, and in the years 1836, 1837, and 1838, respectively, came the 
publication of Nature, the delivery of the Phi Beta Kappa oration, The 
American Scholar, and the Divinity School Address. From this time 
on, his life of literary activity continued, its course marked rather by 
the delivery and publication of lectures and addresses than by events 
of external variety or significance. During the years 1 842-1 844 he was 
editor of the Dial. In 1847 he made a second visit to Europe, embody- 
ing some of the observations of his two trips in English Traits, published 
in 1856. In 1871 he visited California and the next year made a third 
trip abroad. His last years were marked by a gradual decline of his 
faculties, particularly of his memory. He died in 1882. 



63 

men. His father, who died while Waldo was still a small boy, 
was a man of pleasing and affable personality and of marked 
liberality of belief and spirit, " far from having any sympathy 
with Calvinism. ' n Emerson's mother was a woman " of great 
patience and fortitude, of the serenest trust in God, of a dis- 
cerning spirit, and a most courteous bearing. . . . Both her 
mind and her character were of a superior order, and they 
set their stamp upon manners of peculiar softness and natural 
grace and quiet dignity." 2 At the death of her husband she 
struggled bravely to secure the education of her sons. The 
loss of his father made Emerson's youth one of hard work, 
with few opportunities for the usual sports and recreations of 
boyhood. His early intellectual training was under the super- 
vision of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, 3 a woman of noble, 
though of stern character, and of exceptional mental power. 
Her reading 4 was from the best authors, and both her attitude 
toward the world and her literary style — as revealed in her 
remarkable letters — show striking similarities with the philos- 
ophy and style of her nephew. To her influence on him he 
bore testimony when he wrote later in life, " I have no hour 
of poetry or philosophy, since I knew these things, into which 
she does not enter as a genius." 5 To him and to his brothers 
" their mother was a serene and ennobling presence in the 
house ; their aunt a spur, or better, a ferment in their young 
lives." 6 

Emerson seems on the whole to have come less directly in 
contact with Calvinism than did many of the transcendentalists. 
Certainly we find in his works no such bits of fervid writing 
on the subject as we find in Channing's and Parker's, and 

1 Holmes, n. See also, on the next page of Holmes's biography, a 
letter of Emerson concerning his father's theology. 

2 Ibid., 13. 

3 See Emerson's Works, Centenary Edition, x, 593. 

* " Her early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, 
Jonathan Edwards, and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus 
Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Cousin, Herder, Locke, Madame de Stael, 
Channing, Mackintosh, Byron." Emerson's Works, x, 376. 

B Cabot, 30. 

8 Emerson in Concord, 9. 



64 

such allusions as he makes seem to have less of the element of 
personal feeling 1 and more of a calm and even historical 
judiciousness. He says, speaking of the old theology, " false- 
hoods, superstitions, are the props, the scaffolding, on which 
how much of society stands ; " 2 and apropos of the heroism of 
those who believe in fate, " Our Calvinists in the last genera- 
tion had something of the same dignity." 3 Again, in 1841, 
he writes of the Puritans : " Great, grim, earnest men, I belong 
by natural affinity to other thoughts and schools than yours, 
but my affection hovers respectfully about your retiring foot- 
steps, your unpainted churches, strict platforms, and sad offices ; 
the iron-gray deacon, and the wearisome prayer, rich with the 
diction of ages." 4 On the other hand, however, though it 
was nominally with Unitarianism, it was really with the tra- 
ditional New England spirit that Emerson came in conflict 
when the dispute over the Lord's Supper led to his retirement 
from the ministry. He thought that this rite, supported by 
custom rather than by vital spiritual meaning, was a bit of 
hollow formalism, and preferred to sever his connection with 
the church rather than to continue to administer a sacrament 
into which his whole heart could not enter. 5 His resignation 
was voluntary and there was no ill feeling on either side. 

II 

Of Emerson's earliest reading we know comparatively little, 
but we can scarcely be wrong in inferring that it included some 
of the favorite authors of his aunt, to whom reference has 
already been made. We hear of his delight in Scott's poetry 
and in Ossian ; 6 but of the influences that first and most pro- 
foundly helped to shape Emerson's thought we know hardly 
anything more interesting than the following, from a letter 

1 For his criticism of a church service, see Works, Centenary Edition, 
vi, 413. 

2 Journal, 1834, Cabot, 303. 

3 Works, vi, 11. See also Ibid., x, 107, and Cabot, 594- 

* Ibid., 304, and other entries in his journal corroborate the same 
general contention. 

6 For the sermon preached to justify his attitude, see Works, xi, 9. 
6 Works, Centenary Edition, v, 337. 



65 

(1841) to Margaret Fuller: " I know but one solution to my 
nature and relations, which I find in remembering the joy with 
which in my boyhood I caught the first hint of the Berkeleyan 
philosophy, and which I certainly never lost sight of after- 
wards." 1 Even at the price of some violence to chronology 
it is worth while to place by this another passage. The con- 
tradiction, 2 highly typical of Emerson, is doubtless more 
seeming than real, but it helps to show how guardedly we must 
take his superlative statements. " In Roxbury in 1825 I read 
Cotton's translation of Montaigne. It seemed to me as if I 
had written the book myself in some former life, so sincerely 
it spoke my thought and experience. No book before or 
since was ever so much to me as that." 3 

While in college Emerson's retiring disposition did not lead 
him to make acquaintances rapidly. One of his class-mates 
writes : " By degrees, however, the more studious members of 
the class began to seek him out. They found him to be un- 
usually thoughtful and well-read ; knowing perhaps less than 
they about text-books, but far more about literature. He had 
studied the early English dramatists and poets, pored over 
Montaigne, and knew Shakespeare almost by heart." 4 He 
belonged during his sophomore year to a book-club that 
subscribed for the North American Review and the leading 
English periodicals and that spent many of its evenings in 
reading Scott's novels. His notebooks give " evidence of wide 
reading of a desultory kind, in which history, memoirs, and the 
English Reviews are prominent." 5 He knew something, too, 
of contemporary poets, Byron, Moore, Coleridge, and Words- 
worth, though his opinion of the latter two was to undergo 
a radical change. 

Among Emerson's teachers were George Ticknor and Ed- 
ward Everett, who had just returned from abroad, bringing 

1 Cabot, 478. 

2 For surely we are not to escape it by insisting on the strict literal- 
ness of the word " book." 

3 Emerson in Concord, 29. 
* Cabot, 59. 

b Ibid., 58. 

6 



66 

with them an enthusiasm for German literature and German 
university methods. He appears to have given particular 
attention to their courses. We know too that he studied 
philosophy. Berkeley has been mentioned ; of Bacon, 1 Locke, 
Hume, 2 and Stewart, Emerson also knew something; and 
his two Bowdoin prize dissertations on The Character of 
Socrates and The Present State of Ethical Philosophy 3 show 
his interest in metaphysical thought and a knowledge of its 
history. 

Emerson's studies were continued after graduation : 
" . . . he early came to love Plato, and, after leaving col- 
lege, seems to have studied him very closely. At this period 
Tillotson, Augustine, 4 and Jeremy Taylor were among his 
favorite authors. One of the earliest of the serious books he 
read was a translation of Pascal's Pensees, which he carried to 
church with him and read almost constantly." 5 

While studying divinity Emerson felt to some extent the 
influence of Dr. Channing, under whom he would have liked 
to have his preparation. Channing, unwilling to undertake 
this formally, conferred with him occasionally and recom- 
mended books for reading. Emerson wrote to his aunt in 
1823 : " Dr. Channing is preaching sublime sermons every 
Sunday morning in Federal Street," 6 and though the two 
men never came into intimate contact, Emerson's character- 
ization of Channing as " our Bishop " 7 is a clear recognition of 
indebtedness. After his trip abroad he spoke of him as "the 
King of preachers," 8 saying that there were no such men in 
Great Britain. Of the other transcendentalists, Alcott doubt- 
less had the most influence on Emerson. The practical cer- 

1 Bacon and Berkeley " have been friends to me." Woodbury, Talks 
with Ralph Waldo Emerson, 26. 

2 Cabot, 104. 

3 Both these are reprinted in Dr. Hale's Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

4 On Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, see Works, Centenary Edition, 
i, 414. 

5 Cooke, 22. 

6 Cabot, 105. 

7 Miss Peabody, Reminiscences, 371. 

8 Sanborn, The Personality of Emerson, 40. 



67 

tainty that the former was the orphic poet of Nature, together 
with Emerson's repeated high estimates 1 of his intellect, is 
evidence in this direction. 

Before entering in more detail on an account of Emerson's 
reading, it may be well to say a word concerning his general 
attitude toward books and study. There is no doubt that 
Emerson loved books and that he read very widely. Indeed 
it would hardly be an exaggeration to affirm that a large part 
of his life was spent in reading. Yet his own writings — 
though such a book as English Traits might in itself be 
considered by some a refutation of the statement — scarcely 
give the impression of being the work of a learned man, nor 
does there seem to be evidence that Emerson deserves to be 
called a really careful or scholarly reader. He appears to have 
used books much more for imbibing the spirit of their writers 
and extracting felicitous quotations than for studying the de- 
tails of their thought. " I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, 
as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the 
fancy and the imagination. I read for the lustres." 2 In 
nearly all of the authors in whom he takes special delight there 
is at least a touch of mysticism, and in all of them there can 
be detected a kinship of some sort with Emerson's own na- 
ture — in Plato and Plotinus, in Goethe and Coleridge, in 
Swedenborg and the authors of the " Oriental Scriptures." 
This sympathy enabled him to comprehend, as it were, in a 
flash, their points of view. He could think in their ways and 
so he repeats their thoughts. He rarely gives us the impres- 
sion of having laboriously or exhaustively studied another 
author. 

He writes in his Journal for February 8, 1825 : " My cardinal 
vice of intellectual dissipation — sinful strolling from book to 
book, from care to idleness — is my cardinal vice still ; is a 
malady that belongs to the chapter of incurables." 3 And else- 
where he expresses a longing for the gift of continuity. 4 In 

1 See p. 159, n. 4. 

2 Works, iii, 222. 

3 Cabot, in. 

4 Ibid., 295 ; and see also Works, xii, 48. 



68 

the same connection a passage from the essay on Experience 
is illuminating : " Once I took such delight in Montaigne that 
I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in 
Shakspeare ; then in Plutarch ; then in Plotinus ; at one time 
in Bacon ; afterward in Goethe ; even in Bettine ; but now I 
turn the pages of either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish 
their genius." 1 We cannot help wondering how far Emerson 
is speaking out of his own experience, and how far by " read- 
ing " he means careful reading, when he says in his Journal 
for 1837, " If you elect writing for your task in life, I believe 
you must renounce all pretension to reading." 2 

Emerson's views on the function of books are given very 
vigorously in the American Scholar: 

" Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their 
duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which 
Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon 
were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these 
books." 

" Books are the best of things, well used ; abused, among the 
worst. What is the right use? . . . They are for nothing 
but to inspire." 

" Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. 
Books are for the scholar's idle times." 

But it is in the essay on Books more than anywhere else 
that we find Emerson's ideas about the literature of the world 
and the place it should occupy in a man's life. Probably this 
essay reflects pretty accurately the place that that literature 
actually did fill and had filled in his life, for while recognizing 
his habit of speaking familiarly of writers of whom he had 
little or no knowledge, we are bound to admit that the im- 
pression obtained from this paper is that its author had at 
least a fair acquaintance with the more important works which 
he mentions. 3 And this view is corroborated by a study of 
the sources of Emerson's quotations. " There are books ; and 

1 Works, Centenary Edition, iii, 55. 

2 Cabot, 291. 

3 His list of these best books is too long to transcribe here in detail. 
Its principal names will be included in the course of the discussion. 



69 

it is practicable to read them, because they are so few ; " " Be 
sure then to read no mean books," — these are the texts of the 
essay. It is a plea for the reading of the works " of rich and 
believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them." 
" I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library," he remarks, 
" and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction 
that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my 
study at home." 

What he says in this essay on the subject of translations 
reveals the transcendental tendency to exalt content above 
style, and shows how insensible he could be to the true sig- 
nificance of literary form: 

" What is really best in any book is translatable, any real 
insight or broad human sentiment. ... I rarely read any 
Latin, Greek, German, Italian, sometimes not a French book, 
in the original, which I can procure in a good version. . . . 
I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when 
I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals 
when I have them rendered for me in my mother-tongue." 1 

On turning to a more detailed discussion of the writers who 
apparently most influenced Emerson, we should bear in mind 
the incessant habit of exaggeration of this author of The 
Superlative (a transcendental habit concerning which we shall 
have more to say in another part of our discussion). It is 
quite unsafe in this matter to trust any single, isolated sentence ; 
yet, after all, perhaps it is not so difficult to distinguish between 
the cases where he means his absolute statement and where it 
is a mere rhetorical mannerism. 

Emerson's reading and love of Shakespeare early in life seem 
to have been real, not merely invented by his admirers as 
forming an indispensable part of the biography of a man of 
letters. We have seen the statement of a classmate that he 
knew Shakespeare almost by heart. The frequency with which 
Emerson quotes him gives ground for the evident purport of 
the exaggeration. It would be superfluous to transcribe pas- 
sages showing the high esteem in which Emerson held Shakes- 

1 See, in this connection, George Ripley's statement, Frothingham, 
George Ripley, 268. 



70 

peare. He reiterates his inconceivable wisdom and " tran- 
scendent superiority m over all other writers, and, as in the 
following, ascribes to him the most potent influence : 

" . . . he is the father of German literature : it was with 
the introduction of Shakespeare into German, by Lessing, and 
the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the 
rapid burst of German literature was most intimately con- 
nected." 2 

Concerning Montaigne's influence on Emerson the quotation 
already given is sufficient. 3 

Of Plato Emerson made the acquaintance when in college,* 
first probably through the medium of Cudworth's The True 
Intellectual System of the Universe. He writes in his journal 
in 1845, referring to a period just after his graduation : 

" I had read in Cudworth from time to time for years, and 
one day talked of him with Charles W. Upham, my classmate, 
and found him acquainted with Cudworth's argument and 
theology, and quite heedless of all I read him for, — namely, 
his citations from Plato and the philosophers. . . . " 5 

From Plato, too, we are told, Emerson got his earliest con- 
ception of the symbolism of nature, 6 and he once declared 
" that it was a great day in a man's life when he first read 
the Symposium" 1 Indeed, there seems to be considerable 
evidence for the belief that in the long run Plato forms the 
most continuously powerful influence on Emerson's thinking. 
It is only " sometimes " that he reads Plato " for the lustres " ; 
he tells (1841) of taking away with him " Phsedrus, Meno and 
the Banquet which I have diligently read," 8 and the whole im- 
pression left by his various statements is that Emerson came 
as near really studying Plato as any writer he ever read. 
" Among secular books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's 

1 Works, vi, 137. 

2 Ibid., iv, 195. See also xii, 180. 

8 See also Works, Centenary Edition, iv, 337. 
* Ibid., ii, 427. 
6 Ibid., iv, 294. 

6 Ibid., ii, 436. 

7 Ibid., iv, 307. 

8 Ibid., iv, 310; see also Ibid., 311. 



71 

fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, ' Burn the 
libraries ; for, their value is in this book/ " — so begins the 
essay on Plato; and these sentences are from that on Books: 
" Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no end. 
. . . He contains the future, as he came out of the past. 
. . . Nothing has escaped him/' These and dozens of other 
similar assertions appear somewhat less hyperbolic when we 
consider, what seems to have been true, that Emerson well-nigh 
identified the spiritual and ideal, with the Platonic way of 
looking at things. This alone could have allowed such a 
statement as, " How Plato came thus to be Europe, and phi- 
losophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to solve," 1 
or can render less than absurd, " 'Tis quite certain, that 
Spenser, Burns, Byron and Wordsworth will be Platonists ; and 
that the dull men will be Lockists." 2 Emerson came near to 
believing that all the great spiritual truths " have a kind of 
filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks." 3 

Another of Emerson's favorites is Plutarch, and the fre- 
quency with which he quotes him, together with the rather 
detailed section given to him in the essay on Books, proves that 
he is an author whom he had read extensively. " He required 
his son to read two pages of Plutarch's Lives every schoolday 
and ten pages on Saturdays and in vacation ;" 4 and we are 
told that Emerson called Plutarch's Morals* " his tuning-key 
when he was about to write." 6 

Emerson took a marked interest in the Neo-Platonists. " In 
1835 ne began to study Plotinus, and other writers of the same 
class. The German mystics attracted his attention, as did 
the English idealists." 7 He read Plotinus, Porphyry, and 

1 Works, iv, 46. 

2 Ibid., v, 228. 

3 Ibid., 229. 

4 Emerson in Concord, 1 74. 

5 He wrote a preface to Prof. W. W. Goodwin's edition of the Morals, 
1871. Reprinted in Works, x, 277. 

6 Mrs. Dall, Margaret and Her Friends, 139. 

7 Cooke, 39. The rest of the same passage may be appended, though, 
as has been and will be pointed out, he knew some of these authors 
much earlier than 1835, " The same year he was reading, with the keenest 
relish and enthusiasm, the poems of George Herbert, and the prose writings 
of Cudworth, Henry More, Milton, Coleridge, and Jeremy Taylor. As the 
result of these studies ... he wrote . . . Nature." 



72 

Synesius in Thomas Taylor's translations. 1 In 1841 he writes, 
" I have also three volumes new to me of Thomas Taylor's 
Translations, Proclus, Ocellus Lucanus, and Pythagorean 
Fragments." 2 (In 1842 he was reading Jamblicus' Life of 
Pythagoras.) 3 

His interest in mystical philosophy, however, was not con- 
fined to that of the Neo-Platonists. Boehme 4 too he knew ; 
but better perhaps than any other, Swedenborg. 5 Only a few 
years after leaving college his attention was drawn in this 
direction by Mr. Sampson Reed, a Boston Swedenborgian and 
the author of Observations on the Growth of the Mind, 6 a book 
which had attracted Emerson's favorable notice; and while 
studying divinity he was dipping into the Swede. 7 In the 
third letter of the Carlyle correspondence he says of the fol- 
lowers of Swedenborg : " They are to me, however, deeply in- 
teresting, as a sect which I think must contribute more than 
all other sects to the new faith which must arise out of all." 
In his essay on Swedenborg occurs a passage on mysticism 
in general in which, while he treats it sympathetically, he 
condemns all its extreme manifestations and points out its kin- 
ship with pathological conditions of the mind. To Swedenborg 
he attributes profound insight into the spiritual constitution 
of the world, but at the end he qualifies : " The entire want 
of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and, 
like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning. 
I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His great 
name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monu- 
ment." 8 

Closely allied to these other mystical influences was that of 
the poetry and sacred scriptures of the Orient, especially of 
India and Persia. 9 Though Emerson did not make their 

1 Cabot, 290 ; Works, Centenary Edition, i, 437 and 441-442 ; v, 400. 

2 Ibid., iv, 310. 
8 Ibid., ii, 296. 

4 Works, iii, 38 and 180; iv, 136; viii, 263. 

5 Works, Centenary Edition, iv, 321. 

6 Emerson in Concord, 37; Holmes, 80. 

7 Works, Centenary Edition, iv, 295. 

8 Works, iv, 138. 

9 See The Genius and Character of Emerson, 372. 



73 

acquaintance till later they may perhaps best be spoken of here. 
This interest in " Ethnical Scriptures " was widespread among 
the transcendentalists (Thoreau's liking for them is well 
known), and translations of the oldest ethical and religious 
writings were begun in the third volume of the Dial. His 
Journal for 1845 " shows that Mr. Emerson was reading, not 
only in the Koran and Akhlak-i-Jalaly, but in the East Indian 
scriptures, and he gives quotations. He writes, ' The East is 
grand and makes Europe appear the land of trifles.' "* This 
same admiration of the Orient is shown in the essay on Plato : 
" In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the 
conception of the fundamental Unity. . . . This tendency 
finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the 
East, and chiefly, in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the 
Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those writings con- 
tain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime 
strains in celebrating it." And in his enumeration of the 
" Bibles of the world " in the essay on Books those just men- 
tioned, together with several other Eastern scriptures, are 
included. 

The little poem Brahma is worthy of mention in this con- 
nection. It would be hard to imagine a more condensed sum- 
mary of Oriental pantheism than is contained in these sixteen 
short lines, and Mr. W. T. Harris has shown by passages cited 
from the Bhagavad Gita how Brahma is an epitome of that 
whole book. 2 The similarity even in the details of the expres- 
sion proves that Emerson must have known his source inti- 
mately. 

Besides the Indian, Emerson knew something of the Persian 
writers, mainly, through the German translation of Baron Von 
Hammer-Purgstall ; and he contributed to the Atlantic Monthly 
in 1858 a paper on Persian Poetry. 3 Hafiz and Saadi he knew 
best apparently, the former being first spoken of in his Journal 
for 1 84 1. 4 

1 Works, Centenary Edition, iv, 314. 

2 The Genius and Character of Emerson, 373. 

3 Reprinted, Works, viii, 225. 

* Works, Centenary Edition, viii, 413. 



74 

" At the age of 23 Mr. Emerson had been interested in Cole- 
ridge and by him in German thought." 1 Even before this, 
while in college, he had known something of Coleridge's poetry. 
We find him writing to his aunt December 10, 1829: "I am 
reading Coleridge's * Friend ' with great interest. . . . He 
has a tone a little lower than greatness, but what a living soul, 
what a universal knowledge," 2 and he continues through a 
long paragraph of high adulation. Speaking of Carlyle's 
Sartor Resartus, Mr. Cabot says : " . . . when I tried, long 
afterward, to recall to him the stir the book made in the minds 
of some of the younger men, he hesitated, and said he supposed 
he had got all that earlier from Coleridge." 3 

From the passages devoted to him in English Traits, 4 " we 
draw the conclusion that Emerson esteemed Wordsworth by 
far the greatest of the more modern English poets. " The Ode 
on Immortality," he writes, " is the high-water-mark which 
the intellect has reached in this age ;" 5 and elsewhere, " the 
capital merit of Wordsworth is that he has done more for the 
sanity of this generation than any other writer." 6 He speaks 
of having hung over the works of Wordsworth and Carlyle in 
his chamber at home, 7 and he once declared " that he still 
found himself unable to compare any early intellectual experi- 
ence with the effect produced on his mind by the poet's de- 
scription of the influence of nature upon the mind of a boy." 8 
" The fame of Wordsworth," he wrote in the Dial, " is a 
leading fact in modern literature. . . . The Excursion awak- 
ened in every lover of Nature the right feeling. We saw 
stars shine, we felt the awe of mountains, we heard the rustle 
of the wind in the grass, and knew again the ineffable secret 
of solitude." 9 We are told that " Emerson could quote almost 

1 Ibid., v, 330. 

2 Cabot, 161. 

3 Ibid., 241. 

* Works, v, 21 and 279. See also Works, xii, 225. 

5 Works, v, 282. 

6 Ibid., xii, 227. 

7 Emerson in Concord, 45. 

8 Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, 50. 

9 Works, xii, 187 (from the Dial). 



75 

entirely the ' Prelude ' and ' Excursion ' so much had he 
pondered them," 1 and in Parnassus, his book of selections from 
the poets, Wordsworth (43 selections) stands next to Shakes- 
peare (88). 

For the poetry of Shelley Emerson had a rather marked dis- 
taste, declaring that he could never read it " with comfort." 2 

Landor he read in 1832, making transcripts from the 
Imaginary Conversations? 

Emerson's relations with Carlyle are so well known, through 
their remarkable friendship and the publication of their corre- 
spondence, that they do not need detailed restatement here. 
About the year 1828 Emerson began to be interested in the 
articles of Carlyle appearing at that time in the English and 
Scotch reviews. 4 Soon after, he read Wilhelm Meister in 
Carlyle's translation, passages from it being found in his 
"Blotting Book" for the fall of 1830. 5 The desire to see 
Carlyle himself was one of the hopes that attracted him to 
Europe in 1833. In 1836 he published an American edition 
of Sartor and in 1838 collected some of Carlyle's writings from 
the reviews and brought them out under the title of Critical 
and Miscellaneous Essays. Among others, one result of this 
acquaintance with Carlyle was the turning of Emerson's more 
careful attention to German and especially to Goethe. A few 
quotations may be given, from the Carlyle-Emerson corre- 
spondence, on this subject ; but first let us notice what Dr. 
Hedge wrote of Emerson in 1828 : 

" I tried to interest him in German literature, but he laugh- 
ingly said that as he was entirely ignorant of the subject, he 
should assume that it was not worth knowing. Later he 
studied German, mainly for the purpose of acquainting him- 

1 Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, 46. The temptation 
is to believe this an exaggeration, but it is interesting to compare the 
statement that Emerson knew Shakespeare almost by heart, and to 
remember how he recalled all of Lycidas except three lines, when un- 
aware that he knew any of it. See Works, Centenary Edition, xii, 458. 

3 Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, 53. 

3 Works, Centenary Edition, ii, 389 ; see also Ibid., v, 327. 

4 Emerson in Concord, 36. 

5 Works, Centenary Edition, iv, 295. 



76 

self with Goethe, to whom his attention had been directed 1 by 
Carlyle." 2 

And now from letter iii (1834), Emerson to Carlyle: " Far, 
far better seems to me the unpopularity of this Philosophical 
Poem 3 (shall I call it?) than the adulation that followed your 
eminent friend Goethe. With him I am becoming better 
acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration. . . . 
The Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such 
as he."* 

From letter vi (1835), Emerson to Carlyle: ". . . we 
know enough here of Goethe and Schiller to have some interest 
in German literature. A respectable German here, Dr. Follen, 
has given lectures to a good class upon Schiller. I am quite 
sure that Goethe's name would now stimulate the curiosity of 
scores of persons." 5 

From letter xii (1836), Emerson to Carlyle: " I read Goethe, 
and now lately the posthumous volumes, with a great interest." 6 

From letter Hi (1840), Carlyle to Emerson: "Do you read 
German or not? . . . Tell me. Or do you ever mean to 
learn it? I decidedly wish you would." 1 

Emerson answered a few weeks later : " You asked me if 
I read German, and forget if I have answered. I have con- 
trived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fifty- 
five, but I have read nothing else : but I have not now looked 
even into Goethe for a long time." 8 

Emerson wrote to Grimm in 1861 : " I read German with 
some ease, and always better, yet I never shall speak it." 9 

And ten years later to the same : " I duly received from you 
the brochure on Schleiermacher, and read with interest, though 

1 Coleridge had probably introduced him to Goethe before he read 
Carlyle at all. Ibid., iv, 295. 

2 Cabot, 139. 

3 Sartor Resartus. 

4 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, 29. 

5 Ibid., 55. 

6 Ibid., 100. 

7 Ibid., 299. 

8 Ibid., 311. 

9 Emerson-Grimm Correspondence, 60. 



77 

his was never one of my high names. For Goethe I think I 
have an always ascending regard." 1 

Beside his treatment of him in Representative Men, 2 Emer- 
son discussed Goethe at length in his Thoughts on Modern 
Literature^ in the Dial, speaking of him as the man who in the 
most extraordinary degree united in himself the tendencies of 
the age, but always charging him with moral deficiences. In 
1844, writing of his great influence, he characterized him as 
" precisely the individual in whom the new ideas appeared and 
opened to their greatest extent and with universal application, 
. . ." 4 Nearly all of Emerson's numerous discussions of 
Goethe contain the double elements of praise and blame — 
both oftentimes appearing in the same passage. For example : 
" The old eternal Genius who built the world has confided him- 
self more to this man than to any other. . . . Goethe can 
never be dear to men. He has not even the devotion to pure 
truth ; but to truth for the sake of culture." 5 

To other German writers there are references here and there 
in Emerson's works which seem to imply at least a superficial, 
almost beyond doubt an indirect, knowledge. This knowledge 
was attained too in some cases after the height of the tran- 
scendental movement. Thus of Kant, 6 of Schelling, of Hegel, 
and of Schleiermacher, 7 of whom the last, as we have just 
heard, was not one of Emerson's high names. 

In one of his earliest addresses 8 he speaks as if acquainted 
with Cousin's system. His remarks are rather disparaging 
to the Frenchman's philosophy. In English Traits he speaks 
of him again, — " whose lectures we had all been reading in 
Boston." 

It remains to say just a word of Emerson's reading along 
one or two other lines. 

x Ibid., 85. 

2 Works, iv, 247. 

3 Works, xii, 189. 

4 Works, Centenary Edition, iv, 372. 

5 Works, iv, 270. See also Ibid., iii, 230, and viii, 69. 

6 Ibid., vii, 30 ; viii, 463 ; x, 240 and 310. 

7 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence , 50. 

8 Works, i, 165. 



78 

He had dipped pretty widely into English literature — Eliza- 
bethan and seventeenth-century especially. He speaks himself 
of his " habit of idle reading in old English books," and tells 
how he made Margaret Fuller acquainted (about 1835) " with 
Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, 
Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne." 1 
Mr. Conway puts it more emphatically : " Emerson went thor- 
oughly into old English books, from Chaucer to Sir Thomas 
Browne and Burton, but valued more highly the earliest of 
these." 2 

One class of books, of which except in the case of Plutarch 
and Jamblicus almost no mention has been made, constituted 
a conspicuous part of Emerson's reading: biographies. The 
essay on Books in itself would make this clear, but we have 
other evidence : about the time he left the church, for instance, 
he was deeply interested in the life of George Fox; 3 and we 
hear too that he read all the available memoirs of Napoleon. 4 
" Mr. Emerson's reading was largely in biographies. For 
novels and romances he cared little." 5 

This last statement receives corroboration, 6 for we are told 
that he did not care for Kingsley, 7 and he declared himself 
that he " never could turn a dozen pages in ' Don Quixote ' 
or Dickens without a yawn." 8 In favor of George Sand's 
Consuelo he seems to have made somewhat of an exception — 
probably on account of its mystical element. 

Emerson was always enthusiastic over the advance of sci- 
ence, and some of his earliest lectures were on scientific sub- 
jects. This enthusiasm followed almost inevitably from his 
transcendental belief, for transcendentalism is itself a natural- 
istic interpretation of the world, is founded, we might almost 
say, on the conception of law, and welcomed, as if it were its 

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, i, 204. 

2 Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, 105. 

3 Works, Centenary Edition, iii, 332. 

4 Ibid., iv, 359. 

5 Ibid., ii, 392. 

6 Ibid., vii, 412. 

7 Sanborn, The Personality of Emerson, 41. 
Woodbury, Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, 54. 



79 

own, every conquest of science in the diminishing domains 
of the supernatural. To this interest of his father in scientific 
topics, his son has borne witness : " Not only among the poets 
and prophets, but (perhaps with Goethe as a bridge) in the 
works of the advancing men of Science, — John Hunter, La- 
marck, Lyell, Owen, Darwin, — he was quick to recognize a 
great thought." 1 

Before attempting any summary of Emerson's reading, 2 as 
an interesting commentary on our discussion, we may transfer 
from Holmes' biography his exhaustive study of Emerson's 
authorities : 3 

" The named references, chiefly to authors, as given in the 
table before me, are three thousand three hundred and ninety- 
three, relating to eight hundred and sixty-eight different indi- 
viduals. Of these, four hundred and eleven are mentioned 
more than once ; one hundred and fifty-five, five time or more ; 
sixty-nine, ten times or more ; thirty-eight, fifteen times or 
more ; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty- 
seven names alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no 
less than one thousand and sixty-five references. 

Number of Times 
Authorities. Mentioned. 

Shakespeare 112 

Napoleon 84 

Plato 81 

Plutarch 70 

Goethe 62 

Swift 49 

Bacon 47 

Milton 46 

1 Emerson in Concord, 65. See also the Biographical Sketch prefixed 
to the Centenary Edition of his Works (I, xxvi sq.). 

2 For further hints and discussion about Emerson's reading, see (to 
some of these reference has already been made in the foot-notes) : 
Cooke, Chapter xix ; Appendix F to Cabot ; Emerson's Essay on Books ; 
the notes of the Centenary Edition of the Works — among these notes, 
especially those under Representative Men, and a letter giving advice 
about reading, vii, 400. 

3 Holmes, 381. 



80 

Newton 43 

Homer 42 

Socrates 42 

Swedenborg 40 

Montaigne 30 

Saadi 30 

Luther 30 

Webster 27 

Aristotle 25 

Hafiz 25 

Wordsworth 25 

Burke 24 

Saint Paul 24 

Dante 22 

Shattuck (History of Concord) 21 

Chaucer 20 

Coleridge 20 

Michael Angelo 20 

The name of Jesus occurs fifty-four times." 

Unless we attach great significance to his remark about 
Berkeley, it seems harder in the case of Emerson than in that 
of any of the other transcendentalists to tell just what and 
just whence were the most powerful influences that contributed 
to his transcendental views. Of writers of the ideal type, 
chronologically Berkeley came first. Of the rest we cannot be 
certain of the order; but Plato probably was next, and then, 
perhaps not many months apart, Swedenborg and Coleridge 
(and Wordsworth) ; somewhat later came Carlyle and Goethe; 
after them the Neo-Platonists, and still later the Oriental 
writers. 1 Of all of these except the last Emerson knew some- 
thing when Nature appeared, a statement that discloses the 
difficulty of the problem. The many striking similarities, how- 
ever, between Emerson's thought and Coleridge's — and so 
between Emerson's and Schelling's 2 — coupled with the former's 

1 This is the conjectured order of real influence, not merely of intro- 
duction. It neglects for instance Emerson's early knowledge of Coleridge's 
and Wordsworth's poetry. It should be noted too that Emerson speaks 
of taking supreme delight " in Plotinus ; . . . afterward in Goethe." 

2 For Coleridge's confessed obligations to Schelling and his explanation of 
the similarities in their "systems" see Aids to Reflection (Works, New 
York, 1858, iii, 263). 



81 

remark to Dr. Hedge about getting " all that earlier from 
Coleridge" lead us to believe that Coleridge was a more vitally 
stimulating, even if a less continuous influence on Emerson 
than Plato or the Neo-Platonists. We should never forget 
finally, in discussing these transcendentalists, the remarkable 
affinity which seems to exist among nearly all thinkers of the 
mystical type, and especially in the case of Emerson we shall 
not be wrong in finding a considerable underived, original ele- 
ment in his thought. 1 

Parker 2 
I 

Theodore Parker's father, though a farmer and mechanic, 
was a man of intellectual power who, during the intervals of 
his manual toil, found time for wide reading. It is worth 
noting that with marked ability as a mathematician and a deep 
interest in political economy and history, he took his greatest 

1 Emerson once wrote : " He must be a superficial reader of Emerson 
who fancies him an interpreter of Coleridge or Carlyle." Works, Centenary 
Edition, v, 387. 

2 Theodore Parker, the youngest of eleven children, was born in Lexing- 
ton, Massachusetts, in 1810. He was brought up on a farm and from 
early boyhood was accustomed to hard work. His schooling began at the 
age of six and for ten years he had a few months in the district school 
each year. When sixteen he attended the " Academy " at Lexington for a 
quarter. At seventeen he began teaching in district schools, continuing this 
for four years. In 1830 he entered Harvard College, but as he knew he 
could not be spared from his work at home, he tutored himself, merely 
going up for examinations, and so, as a non-resident, was not entitled to a 
degree. Beginning in March, 1831, he taught for a year in a private 
school in Boston. In the spring of 1832 he opened a private school of his 
own in Watertown. Jt was while here that he came under the influence 
of Dr. Convers Francis, and here too he met Miss Lydia D. Cabot, whom 
he married in 1837. In 1834 he entered Cambridge Divinity School, where 
he remained a little over two years. In 1837 he assumed, in West Roxbury, 
his first pastorate. Sailing in 1843, he spent a year in travel in Europe. 
In 1846 he accepted a call to the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society 
in Boston. The immense strain of his labors, especially those connected 
with the anti-slavery struggle, told on his strength, and in 1859 he was 
obliged to give up his ministry and go abroad in search of health. He 
died in Florence in the spring of i860 — an old man at fifty. 

7 



82 

delight in the reading of philosophy. Theodore very probably 
inherited his liking for the metaphysical from his father. 
Parker's mother was of a profoundly religious nature. Her 
religion was not a perfunctory matter but one of deep personal 
experience. This is a part of what her son says of her in an 
autobiographical fragment written not long before his death : 

" She was eminently a religious woman. I have known few 
in whom the religious instincts were so active and so profound, 
and who seemed to me to enjoy so completely the life of God 
in the soul of man. To her the Deity was an Omnipresent 
Father, filling every point of space with His beautiful and 
loving presence. She saw him in the rainbow and in the drops 
of rain which helped compose it as they fell into the muddy 
ground to come up grass and trees, corn and flowers. . . . 
The dark theology of the times seems not to have blackened 
her soul at all. She took great pains with the moral culture 
of her children — at least with mine." 1 

And again in a sermon : " Religion was the inheritance my 
mother gave me in my birth, — gave me in her teachings. . . . 
I mention these things to show you how I came to have the 
views of religion that I have now. My head is not more 
natural to my body, has not more grown with it, than my 
religion out of my soul and with it. With me religion was not 
carpentry, something built up of dry wood from without; but 
it was growth, — growth of a germ in my soul/' 2 

At the close of his autobiography Parker relates an incident 
which occurred when he was only four years old, but of which, 
only a few months before his death, he declared, " I am sure 
no event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impres- 
sion on me." That is the excuse for referring to it here. 

One day on his father's farm he caught sight of a little 
spotted tortoise under a rhodora and started to stike it with a 
stick. " But all at once something checked my little arm, 
and a voice within me said, clear and loud, ' It is wrong ! ' 
I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion — the 
consciousness of an involuntary but inward check upon my 

1 Weiss, i, 23. 

3 Frothingham, 17. 



83 

actions, till the tortoise and the rhodora both vanished from 
my sight. I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, 
and asked what was it that told me it was wrong ? She wiped 
a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking me in her arms, 
said, ' Some men call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the 
voice of God in the soul of man. If you listen and obey it, 
then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you 
right; but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade 
out little by little, and leave you all in the dark and without 
a guide. Your life depends on heeding this little voice.' " x 

Although, because of his parents' simple and liberal beliefs 
and their careful distinction " between a man's character and 
his creed," Parker escaped many of the prevalent theological 
" superstitions " 2 of the times, he did not, even in youth, fail 
to come in vital contact with some of them. This is well 
shown by his experiences on running across a copy of the 
Westminster Catechism : " I can scarcely think without a 
shudder of the terrible effect the doctrine of eternal damnation 
had on me. How many, many hours have I wept with terror 
as I laid [sic] on my bed and prayed, till between praying and 
weeping sleep gave me repose." 3 After reading the life of 
Jonathan Edwards and expressing admiration of his character 
but wondering how such a man could have assented to doc- 
trines like total depravity and eternal damnation, he cries out, 
" Oh ! if they wrung his soul as they have wrung mine, it must 
have bled." 4 But it was in his early youth that this struggle 
took place and he tells us that from his seventh year he had 
" no fear of God, only an ever-greatening love and trust." 5 For 
a whole year, while a student and teacher, he sat under the 

1 Weiss, i, 25. Cf. Jonathan Edwards' account of the conversion of a 
child of four. Narrative of Surprising Conversions, Works, iii, 265. 
Katherine Philips, " the Matchless Orinda," is said to have read her Bible 
through at four. Cf. DeFoe's " Family Instructor " for equally precocious 
religiosity in children. 

2 " I count it a great good fortune that I was bred among religious Uni- 
tarians, and thereby escaped so much superstition." Weiss, ii, 481. 

3 Weiss, i, 30. 
i Weiss, i, 38. 
5 Ibid., ii, 452. 



84 

preaching of Dr. Lyman Beecher, the well-known orthodox 
minister, a fact which speaks for his fairness of mind. He 
expressed great respect for Dr. Beecher, but of his theology 
he writes, " The better I understood it, the more self-contra- 
dictory, unnatural, and hateful did it seem," 1 and looking 
back, later in life, he says of this time, " Dr. Channing was 
the only man in the New England pulpit who to me seemed 
great." 

II 

Of Theodore Parker's early reading he himself says : " Good 
books by great masters fell into even my boyish hands ; the 
best English authors of prose and verse, the Bible, the Greek 
and Roman classics — which I at first read mainly in transla- 
tions, but soon became familiar with in their original beauty — 
these were my literary helps. What was read at all, was also 
studied, and not laid aside till well understood. If my books 
in boyhood were not many, they were much, and also great. 

" I had an original fondness for scientific and metaphysical 
thought, which found happy encouragement in my early days ; 
my father's strong, discriminating and comprehensive mind 
also inclining that way, offered me an excellent help." 2 

Again he says : " Homer and Plutarch I read before I was 
eight ; Rollin's Ancient History about the same time ; and lots 
of histories, with all the poetry I could find, before ten. I 
took to metaphysics about eleven or twelve." 3 

Later among his companions are mentioned Shakespeare and 
Milton, and (now in the original) Homer, Xenophon, 
Demosthenes, and Aeschylus. 4 During his school teaching, in 
addition to his classical reading, he made the acquaintance 
of Cousin and Coleridge ; 5 and as the years go by the names 
begin to come thicker and faster and more bewildering in 
their range, until we are tempted to believe that Theodore 

1 Ibid., i, 57. 

2 Ibid., ii, 450. 

3 Ibid., i, 43. 

4 Ibid., 49. 

5 Ibid., 64. 



85 

Parker read everything, though it should be remarked that he 
always seems to have read for substance rather than for form, 
a fact which helps to explain the enormous number of pages 
covered. 

From almost the first he read in the original, books in other 
than the English language. Early in life he mastered Greek 
and Latin. French, Spanish, and German (this latter in 1831) 
were soon added to his accomplishments. He learned a new 
language with wonderful facility. It would be impossible to 
tell of just how many he really became master, 1 but here are 
a few which we know he studied : Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, 
Icelandic, Chaldaic, Arabic, Persian, Coptic, Swedish, Hebrew, 
Syriac, Anglo-Saxon, Modern Greek. 2 This list in itself gives 
us a hint of what a plastic memory Parker had. He literally 
remembered everything he read. As a boy he could repeat 
a poem of 500 or 1000 lines after a single reading. His 
biographers supply a large number of instances of his wonder- 
ful retention of even the minutest details of his studies. At 
his death his home was more a library than an ordinary 
dwelling house, for he had about 13,000 volumes (of which 
less than one fourth were in English). 3 James Freeman 
Clarke records a conversation in which he asked Parker, " Do 
you read all your books, and do you know what is in them ? " 
" I read them all," he said, " and can give you a table of con- 
tents for each book." 4 A complete account of Parker's read- 
ing, then, would evidently have to include, as one of its divi- 
sions, a catalog of these 13,000 books. It is quite possible, 
however, without approaching the matter in this hopeless way, 
to gain a fair idea of the general character of the works read. 

When, in 1832, Parker was teaching in Watertown, he made 
the intimate acquaintance of Rev. Convers Francis, minister 

1 Lowell, commenting on a sketch of Parker prepared for the Atlantic in 
i860, writes to the author, Mr. Higginson, "Your twenty languages is a 
good many." Mr. Higginson replies in his Old Cambridge, " My phrase 
' twenty languages ' was an underestimate of those in which Parker had 
at least dabbled." 

2 Weiss, i, 72. 

3 Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 93. 

4 Memorial and Biographical Sketches, 120. 



86 

of the First Parish. Mr. Francis, a man of liberal, un- 
dogmatic views, was one of the first persons in New England 
to attain an appreciative knowledge of the German language, 
and both he himself and his library, to which the young 
teacher had access, were factors in giving Parker's mind its 
bent at this critical period. A few names indicating the scope 
of his reading at this time are those of Cicero, Herodotus, 
Thucydides, Pindar, Theocritus, Bion, Moschus (the last four 
of whom he translated), Aeschylus, Cousin, Goethe, Schiller, 
Klopstock, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron. 1 Later, while in the 
divinity school, he found " great help " from a study of the 
Greek philosophers, and still later, during his residence at 
West Roxbury (1837), his reading included De Wette, Jacobi, 
Henry More, Bulwer, Fichte, Coleridge, Descartes. 2 " Spinoza 
I shall take soon as I get my copy. . . . The ' Iliad ' is a 
part of almost every day's reading." " I have got lots of new 
books — upwards of one hundred Germans ! " 3 

His plans of work for a coming week or month at this 
time are also illuminating. Mere plans in the case of some 
men would mean little ; not so with Parker. Here is a sample : 

1. Continue the translation of Ammon. 

2. Continue the study of Plato. 4 

3. Read Tasso and Dante. 

4. Iliad. 

5. Greek Tragedies. 

6. Aristophanes. 

7. Goethe's Memoirs. 

Another plan for a week's work includes De Wette, Jacobi, 
Fichte, and Ammon. 

The more we inquire into Parker's reading the more ap- 
parent it becomes that, in the vast field covered, the works 
most frequently mentioned are those in philosophy, poetry, and 
theology and Biblical criticism. The first and second of these 

1 Frothingham, 39. 

2 Weiss, i, 100. 

3 Ibid., 1 01. 

4 His first reading of Plato had an overpowering effect on him. " I shall 
never forget that event in my life." Weiss, i, 111 ; see also Ibid., ii, 61. 



87 

divisions include many if not most of the greatest of the world's 
philosophers and poets. The following, apropos of a new 
work of Agassiz', which the author had declared that only a 
handful of men in the world could understand, is significant 
as showing what Parker considered the strenuous element in 
his intellectual pabulum : " I suppose it would be presumptuous 
in a man brought up on Descartes, Bacon, Leibnitz, and Newton, 
and fed on Kant, Schelling, 1 and Hegel, not to speak of such 
babies as Plato and Aristotle, to think of comprehending the 
popular lectures of this Swiss dissector of mud-turtles." 2 
Parker's studies in the realm of German theological criticism 
were very wide, 3 and his translation of De Wette's Introduction 
to the Old Testament was his greatest literary achievement. 

But it would be futile to go on merely mentioning names. 4 
The range of his reading was so great that we should be some- 
what at a loss to select from the total array those books and 
men which were most influential on Parker's spiritual growth, 
had he not, fortunately, told us something about this himself. 

When in 1859 he was obliged to give up his Boston pastorate, 
he wrote a letter to his people, a letter which gives an account 
of the religious experience of his life, and so affords consider- 

1 Parker heard Schelling lecture while abroad in 1844, and came into 
first-hand contact with Hegelianism. Frothingham, 201. 

* Ibid., 326. 

3 See e. g., his article on "German Literature." Dial, i, 315. 

* A sentence or two may be quoted from Frothingham's biography 
(p. 46) : 

" Only by transcribing the journal, commenced in 1835, could any idea 
be obtained of the extent of his researches. The folio pages are crowded 
with lists of books read or to be read — analyses, summaries, comments on 
writers of every description, in every tongue. Only to name them would 
be a fatigue, — Eichhorn, Herder, Ammon, De Wette, Paulus, Philo, the 
Greek historians, the fathers of the Church, the Greek and Latin poets, 
Plato, Spinoza, the Wolfenbiittel Fragments. The succession is bewilder- 
ing; but there is the record in the private journal, the veracity whereof 
cannot be disputed, — a record showing acquaintance not with the names 
of the books merely, but with their contents. In two months, November 
and December, 1835, the names of sixty-five volumes are given as having 
been read in German, English, Danish, Latin, Greek. ..." 

For other lists of books read by Parker, see Chadwick, 71 ; Frothing- 
ham, 108-110 (" Plato is a constant companion") ; and Ibid., 177. 



88 

able information concerning the sources of his transcendental- 
ism. 1 After speaking of his early education he tells of his 
decision to become a minister and of the gradual decay of his 
beliefs in many of the accepted doctrines even of the Unitarians. 
The conclusions he reached were much influenced, he says, 
by studies under four heads : 

" I studied the Bible with much care " and " the latest critics 
and interpreters, especially the German." 

" I studied the historical development of religion and theol- 
ogy amongst Jews and Christians." 

" I studied the historical development of religion and theol- 
ogy amongst the nations not Jewish or Christian." 

" I studied assiduously the metaphysics and psychology of 
religion." 

Under this last head he says : " The common books of phi- 
losophy seemed quite insufficient ; the sensational system, so 
ably presented by Locke in his masterly Essay, developed into 
various forms by Hobbes [who — if we may be permitted to 
interrupt the quotation so ruthlessly — died some ten or eleven 
years before the publication of Locke's Essay], Berkeley, 
Hume, Paley and the French Materialists, and modified, but 
not much mended, by Reid and Stewart, gave little help ; it 
could not legitimate my own religious instincts, nor explain 
the religious history of mankind. ..." 

Nor could the views of ecclesiastical writers like Clarke, 
Butler, Cudworth, and Barrow solve his problems or offer 
him much aid. Continuing, he remarks: 

" The brilliant mosaic, which Cousin set before the world, 
was of great service, but not satisfactory. I found most help 
in the works of Immanuel Kant, one of the profoundest 
thinkers in the world, though one of the worst writers, even 
of Germany ; if he did not always furnish conclusions I could 
rest in, he yet gave me the true method, and put me on the 
right road. 

1 Reprinted in the appendix of Weiss's biography. Those interested 
should consult the whole of this article. It gives an excellent conception 
of the thought-ferment of the times. A short summary of a part of it 
will be made at the end of this chapter. 



89 

" I found certain great primal Intuitions of Human Nature, 
which depend on no logical process of demonstration, but are 
rather facts of consciousness given by the instinctive action 
of human nature itself. I will mention only the three most 
important which pertain to Religion. 

" i. The Instinctive Intuition of the Divine, the conscious- 
ness that there is a God. 

" 2. The Instinctive Intuition of the Just and Right, a con- 
sciousness that there is a Moral Law, independent of our will, 
which we ought to keep. 

" 3. The Instinctive Intuition of the Immortal, a conscious- 
ness that the Essential Element of man, the principle of 
Individuality, never dies. 

" Here, then, was the foundation of Religion laid in human 
nature itself, which neither the atheist nor the more pernicious 
bigot, with their sophisms of denial or affirmation, could move 
or even shake. I had gone through the great spiritual trial 
of my life, telling no one of its hopes or fears, and I thought 
it a triumph that I had psychologically established these three 
things to my own satisfaction, and devised a scheme which 
to the scholar's mind, I thought, could legitimate what was 
spontaneously given to all, by the great primal Instincts of 
Mankind." 

We perceive from these quotations that Parker's drawing 
from Kant was from the Critique of Practical rather than from 
the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's writings, it is plain, did 
not offer Parker an entirely new point of view. He gained 
from them, rather, a basis for the belief, the first hint of which 
he had received from his mother and suggestions of which 
he had imbibed from various sources — among others from 
Channing and Emerson. Of his contemporaries, indeed, Chan- 
ning probably had the most potent influence on Parker. What 
Channing's preaching meant to him we have already seen, 1 
while the inspiration he was capable of receiving from Emerson 
is well attested by the following entry in his Journal after 
hearing the Divinity School Address: " My soul is roused, 
and this week I shall write the long-meditated sermons on the 

1 P. 84. 



90 

state of the Church and the duties of these times." 1 Both 
Channing and Emerson will be mentioned again in this con- 
nection at the end of the chapter. 

The early age at which Parker's reading was begun reminds 
one of the still more extraordinary education of John Stuart 
Mill — starting when he was three with a study of Greek — an 
account of the first part of which he has given in the opening 
chapter of his Autobiography. Parker's early studies were 
evidently more purely voluntary, for he had no master stand- 
ing over him comparable to the elder Mill. The voluminous- 
ness of Parker's reading again reminds us of Mill, or of 
Macaulay, especially of the latter's prodigious literary imbib- 
ings when in India. 2 The mention of Macaulay's name and 
the recollection of his wonderful memory suggests a question: 
the question whether Parker is not himself open to the same 
charge which has been brought against Macaulay — of devour- 
ing books simply because they were books. At first sight the 
mere suggestion of such a thing in connection with Parker 
seems the height of injustice, for, if he was anything, he was a 
practical man, who intended to put everything he gained to use. 
Yet one cannot but confess that the impression left by the story 
of his reading is more that of intellectual omnivorousness than 
of scholarly balance, and though one may be at a loss to put 
his finger on the source of the conviction, one can not help 
having the feeling that Parker regarded anything in the shape 
of a book on a serious subject, ipso facto, something to be read 
and made a part of his mental equipment. The truth seems to 
be that he plunged into his reading with that same tremendous 
energy with which he plunged into everything, and the para- 
dox might not be entirely without meaning were we to assert 
that if Parker had been a little less practical himself his reading 
might have been more practically balanced. On the whole, 
although there are plenty of historical considerations 3 to ex- 
plain his attitude toward books (of any serious fault in which 
he must himself have been quite unconscious), one may well 

1 Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad, 175. 

2 See Chapter VI of Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay. 

3 Some of these will be mentioned at the end of this chapter and in the 
concluding chapter of the essay. 



91 

hesitate, in spite of his really immense erudition, to call Parker 
a great scholar. To say what we have said of his reading is 
merely to apply specifically what may be remarked in a wider 
way of the whole man : although the conditions and circum- 
stances of Parker's life may cause us to feel nothing but ad- 
miration for the intensity and strenuousness with which he 
lived, we cannot but feel that his nature would have been more 
fully rounded if it could have included a little of Emerson's 
serene repose. 

Margaret Fuller 1 

I 

On both the paternal and maternal sides Margaret Fuller 
came of Puritan blood. Her father, in the words of Mr. 

1 Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in 1810 in Cambridgeport, a part of 
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Until the middle of 1833 the Fuller home 
remained in Cambridge, and there Margaret spent her early years — except 
for what little time she was away at school — reading and studying widely, 
and forming many of those friendships that were to have vital influence 
on her spiritual growth. In 1833 the Fullers removed to Groton, Massa- 
chusetts, where to Miss Fuller's continued intellectual labors were added 
many family cares and duties. These were greatly increased by the death 
of her father in 1835, and her health became seriously impaired. She had 
been cherishing hopes of travel abroad, but relinquishing these she began 
teaching school to support herself and to help pay for the education of her 
brothers and sisters. She first taught in Bronson Alcott's school in Boston, 
and after that in an academy in Providence. These experiences were in 
1837-1838. Miss Fuller then returned home, and beginning early in 1839 
the family resided for three years at Jamaica Plain, and later at Cam- 
bridge. These years were in a special sense her transcendental period ; 
she was editor of the Dial, and for five winters held her famous " con- 
versations." Toward the end of 1844, at the invitation of Horace Greeley, 
she went to New York to write literary criticism for the Tribune, making 
her home in the Greeley family. While in New York she became widely 
interested in many works of practical philanthropy and social reform. 
Finally, in 1846, her early dream was realized, and she sailed for Europe 
in August of that year. She traveled in England, Scotland, and France, 
where she met many men and women of note. From France in February, 
1847, she went to Italy and there in December she was married to the 
Marquis Ossoli. Owing to the revolutionary troubles in which her husband 
was involved, the union was a secret one. A son was born to them the 
next year. In 1850, when returning to America, father, mother, and child 
were lost in a shipwreck off Fire Island. 



92 

Higginson, was " a man of some narrowness and undue self- 
assertion, very likely ; but conscientious, vigorous, well- 
informed, and public-spirited. His daughter Margaret always 
recognized, after all his mistakes, her great intellectual obliga- 
tions to him ; and his accurate habits of mind were always 
mentioned by her with admiration." 1 Her mother was a 
woman of marked personal beauty and refinement, of humility 
and sweetness, a true example of New England piety. The 
trace of her nature is to be discerned doubtless more in the 
emotional than in the intellectual tendencies of her daughter. 

Margaret Fuller, like Parker and Alcott, has left an auto- 
biographical fragment, written in 1840 and covering the first 
years of her life. In this she tells the story of her early 
education. Her father had sole charge of her training, and 
under his supervision she began the study of Latin at six, 2 
taking up English grammar at the same time. This was but 
the beginning of a long process 3 which, developing her intel- 
lectual powers far too early in life, strained her delicately 
nervous organization and impaired her health. " Poor child ! " 
she exclaims in the autobiography. " Far remote in time, in 
thought, from that period, I look back on these glooms and 
terrors, wherein I was enveloped, and perceive that I had no 
natural childhood." 4 

Just how directly Margaret Fuller came in contact early in 
life with Calvinism and the stricter Puritan spirit is a matter 
about which there appears to be little evidence. In the auto- 
biographical sketch she gives a hint of the way Sunday was 
spent in the Fuller household, showing that it must have been, 
in many respects at least, not unlike the typical New England 
home. " This day was punctiliously set apart in our house. 
We had family prayers, for which there was no time on other 
days. Our dinners were different, and our clothes. We went 

1 Higginson, 16. 

2 See, for remarks on this, Ibid., 22. 

3 A note by the editor, Miss Fuller's brother, on page 352 of Woman in 
the 19th Century should be consulted, in which he asserts that too much 
emphasis has been put upon this sternness of his father's nature and on 
his unwise treatment of Margaret as a child. 

4 Memoirs, i, 16. 



93 

to church. My father put some limitations on my reading, 
but — bless him for the gentleness which has left me a pleasant 
feeling for the day ! — he did not prescribe what was, but only 
what was not, to be done. And the liberty this left was a 
large one." 1 For the rest, we are forced to judge of these 
matters, so few are her allusions to them, mainly from mere 
phrases and sentences dropped here and there in her letters 
and journals, though usually the proper inference is unmis- 
takable. For example: "Cambridge, July 1 1, 1825. — Having 
excused myself from accompanying my honored father to 
church, which I always do in the afternoon, when possible 
. . . " 2 Or again: "It was Thanksgiving day (November, 
1831), and I was obliged to go to church, or exceedingly dis- 
please my father. I almost always suffered much in church 
from a feeling of disunion with the hearers and dissent from 
the preacher." 3 Such remarks as these, and various longer 
passages, 4 while constituting no very voluminous evidence, 
show clearly enough that even though the older doctrines 
and forms were not entirely without meaning and attractive- 
ness for her, 5 in the main Miss Fuller early fell into open 
dissent from the Puritan religious customs and theology. 

II 

The earliest literary influences that touched the life of Mar- 
garet Fuller were the works of the writers of Rome and 
Greece, especially of Rome. She devotes considerable space 
in the autobiographical fragment to an analysis of the Roman 
genius and its effects on her own character. How much in 
her later years she read into these early experiences we cannot 
tell, but this is what she says : 

1 Ibid. t 26. 

2 Ibid., 52. 

8 Ibid., 139. 

* See Memoirs, i, 136, and ii, 91. And in this connection the following 
is of interest : " Margaret . . . said that when she was first old enough 
to think about Christianity, she cried out for her dear old Greek gods. Its 
spirituality seemed nakedness. She could not and would not receive it. 
It was a long while before she saw its deeper meaning." Margaret and 
Her Friends, 161. 

6 Memoirs, i, 197, and ii, 85. 



94 

" I steadily loved this ideal in my childhood, and this is the 
cause, probably, why I have always felt that man must know 
how to stand firm on the ground, before he can fly. In vain, 
for me are men more, if they are less, than Romans. Dante 
was far greater than any Roman, yet I feel he was right to 
take the Mantuan as his guide through hell, and to heaven." 1 
Continuing the account of her childhood she says it was her 
fortune to make the early acquaintance of three great authors, 
Shakespeare, 2 Cervantes, and Moliere, and she tells something 
of what she owed to each. " They taught me to distrust all 
invention which is not based on a wide experience. Perhaps, 
too, they taught me to overvalue an outward experience at 
the expense of inward growth ; but all this I did not appreciate 
till later." 3 

In a letter to a former teacher, written from Cambridge in 
1825 (she was then fifteen) we get a glimpse of her early 
studiousness. After saying that she is taking the time for 
the letter from Ariosto and Helvetius, she goes on : 

" I rise a little before five, walk an hour, and then practise 
on the piano, till seven, when we breakfast. Next I read 
French, — Sismondi's ' Literature of the South of Europe,' — 
till eight, then two or three lectures in Brown's Philosophy. 
About half-past nine I go to Mr. Perkins's school and study 
Greek till twelve, when, the school being dismissed, I recite, 
go home, and practise again till dinner, at two. Sometimes, 
if the conversation is very agreeable, I lounge for half an 
hour over the dessert, though rarely so lavish of time. Then, 
when I can, I read two hours in Italian, but I am often inter- 
rupted." She continues with the account of the rest of her 
day, and concludes, " Thus, you see, I am learning Greek, and 
making acquaintance with metaphysics, and French and Italian 
literature." 4 

From other letters: "Cambridge, May 14, 1826.— I am 
studying Madame de Stael, Epictetus, Milton, Racine, and 

1 Memoirs, i, 20. 

2 Emerson remarked of her about 1835, "She was little read in Shak- 
speare," Ibid., i, 204. 

3 Ibid., 30. 

4 Ibid., 52. 



95 

Castilian ballads, with great delight. There's an assemblage 
for you." 1 Such an " assemblage " is typical of transcendental- 
ism, and highly significant. " Cambridge, January 10, 1827. — 
As to my studies, I am engrossed in reading the elder Italian 
poets, beginning with Berni, from whom I shall proceed to 
Pulci and Politian. I read very critically. Miss Francis 
and I think of reading Locke, as introductory to a course of 
English metaphysics, and then De Stael on Locke's system." 2 

There is proof that always from these early years, but 
especially while in Groton, 3 Margaret Fuller read widely and 
voluminously ; at a rate like Gibbon's, Emerson said. She 
began the study of German in 1832 and at that time she was 
already acquainted with masterpieces of French, Italian, and 
Spanish literature. It would be as useless as it would be 
impossible to make a complete catalog of the works she read ; 
but a few names, and here and there extracts from her letters 
and journals, will indicate the range of interest. 

She tells of reading Godwin, 4 some of the later Elizabethan 
dramatists 5 — Ford, Shirley, Heywood — " all Jefferson's let- 
ters, 6 the North American, the daily papers, etc., without end." 7 

" American History ! Seriously, my mind is regenerating 
as to my country, for I am beginning to appreciate the United 
States and its great men. . . . Had I but been educated in 
the knowledge of such men as Jefferson, Franklin, Rush ! I 
have learned now to know them partially." 8 

She refers to a course of study laid out for the winter of 
1834, which she mentions as nearly completed, " the History 
and Geography of Modern Europe, beginning the former in 
the fourteenth century ; the Elements of Architecture ; the 
works of Alfieri, with his opinions on them; the historical and 

1 Ibid., 55. 

2 Ibid., 55- 

3 Higginson, 45. 

4 Memoirs, i, no. 

5 Ibid., 115. 

6 See Mr. Higginson's remarks on the significance of Miss Fuller's reading 
Jefferson ; Higginson, 4 and 308. 

''Memoirs, i, 124, from an entry headed "Groton." 
8 Ibid., 149. 



96 

critical works of Goethe and Schiller, and the outlines of 
history of our own country." 1 The enthusiasm she felt for 
her studies is shown by an entry in 1836 ( ?) : "I am having 
one of my ' intense ' times, devouring book after book. I 
never stop a minute, except to talk with mother, having laid 
all little duties on the shelf for a few days." 2 Then she goes 
on to speak of Mackintosh and Shelley. 3 Again (1836) : "I 
have ventured on a book so profound as the Novum Organum." 4 
And still again: "1836. — I have, for the time, laid aside De 
Stael and Bacon, for Martineau and Southey. ... I have 
finished Herschel, and really believe I am a little wiser. I 
have read, too, Heyne's letters twice, Sartor Resartus once, 
some of Goethe's late diaries, Coleridge's Literary Remains, 
and drank [sic] a great deal from Wordsworth. ... I find 
my insight of this sublime poet perpetually deepening." 5 Later 
she wrote of Wordsworth as her " beloved friend and vener- 
ated teacher." 6 

In May, 1837, 7 she returned to Emerson a borrowed copy 
of Coleridge's Literary Remains, " ' ransacked pretty thor- 
oughly,' " and of The Friend " with which she ' should never 
have done.' " She subscribed 7 at about the same time for two 
copies of Carlyle's Miscellanies ; and in 1839 had evidently 
borrowed Tennyson, 8 for she wrote, " I thought to send 
Tennyson next time but cannot part with him." Of Coleridge 
her opinion, uttered somewhat later, was : 

" I have little more to say at present except to express a 
great, though not fanatical veneration for Coleridge, and a 
conviction that the benefits conferred by him on this and future 
ages are as yet incalculable. Every mind will praise him for 
what it can best receive from him. He can suggest to an 
infinite degree ; he can mform, but he cannot reiorm and 

1 Ibid., 150. 

2 Ibid. , 164. 

3 See Higginson, 42, note. 

4 Memoirs, i, 166. 

5 Ibid., 166. 

6 Papers on Literature and Art, i, 89. 

7 Higginson, 69. 

8 See Memoirs, ii, 66. 



97 

renovate. To the unprepared he is nothing, to the prepared, 
everything." 1 

A number of extracts from letters in 1839 show that Miss 
Fuller was reading fairly extensively in French authors at 
that time. Moliere, 2 George Sand, 3 De Vigny, 4 and Beranger 5 
come in for special mention. Of Rousseau, the following is 
of interest as showing how early she read him and how great 
his influence was ; but when, before or since, has the epithet 
" stately " been bestowed on Rousseau, and what a light the 
word sheds on her own mental condition ! — " Blessed be the 
early days when I sat at the feet of Rousseau, prophet sad 
and stately as any of Jewry! Every onward movement of 
the age, every downward step into the solemn depths of my 
own soul, recalls thy oracles, O Jean Jacques ! " 6 

About this same time, too, she appears to have been taking 
great interest in art and the history of art. 7 

So far, we have purposely omitted all but incidental refer- 
ence to what made up Miss Fuller's most extensive and thor- 
ough study, works in the Italian and in the German language. 
Concerning the German, an entry in her diary only a few 
months before she moved to Groton in 1833 is of interest: 

" I have settled the occupations of the coming six months. 
Some duties come first, — to parents, brothers, and sisters, — 
but these will not consume above one sixth of the time. . . . 
All hopes of traveling I have dismissed. All youthful hopes, 
of every kind, I have pushed from my thoughts. I will not, 
if I can help it, lose an hour in castle building and repining, 
— too much of that already. I have now a pursuit of im- 
mediate importance : to the German language and literature I 
will give my undivided attention. I have made rapid progress 
for one quite unassisted. 8 

1 Papers on Literature and Art (1846), i, 88. 

2 Memoirs, i, 244. 
9 Ibid., 248. 

* Ibid., 250. 

5 Ibid., 258. 

6 Ibid., 251 ; see also ii, 206. 

7 Ibid., i, 265. 

8 Higginson, 41. 

8 



98 

James Freeman Clarke gives this description of Miss 
Fuller's German studies : 

" Of Margaret's studies while at Cambridge, I knew per- 
sonally only of the German. She already, when I first became 
acquainted with her, had become familiar with the masterpieces 
of French, Italian and Spanish literature. . . . 

" Margaret began to study German early in 1832. Both 
she and I were attracted towards this literature, at the same 
time, by the wild bugle-call of Thomas Carlyle, in his romantic 
articles on Richter, Schiller, and Goethe, which appeared in 
the old Foreign Review, the Edinburgh Review, and after- 
wards in the Foreign Quarterly. 

" I believe that in about three months from the time that 
Margaret commenced German, 1 she was reading with ease 
the masterpieces of its literature. Within the year, she had 
read Goethe's Faust, Tasso, Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, 
Elective Affinities, and Memoirs ; Tieck's William Lovel, 
Prince Zerbino, and other works ; Korner, 2 Novalis, and some- 
thing of Richter ; all of Schiller's principal dramas, and his 
lyric poetry. Almost every evening I saw her, and heard an 
account of her studies. Her mind opened under this influence, 
as the apple blossom at the end of a warm week in May." 3 

And Emerson writes: "When she came to Concord, 4 she 
was already rich in friends, rich in experiences, rich in culture. 
She was well read in French, Italian, and German literature. 
She had learned Latin and a little Greek. But her English 
reading was incomplete ; and, while she knew Moliere, and 
Rousseau, and any quantity of French letters, memoirs, and 
novels, and was a dear student of Dante and Petrarca, and 
knew German books more cordially than any other person, 
she was little read in Shakspeare ; and I believe I had the 
pleasure of making her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben 
Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, 
with Bacon and Sir Thomas Browne. 5 . . . 

1 See Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 359. 

2 Memoirs, i, 169. " I trust you will be interested in my favorite Korner." 

3 Ibid., 112. 

4 He met her in 1835. 

5 Memoirs, i, 204. 



99 

" Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, were her friends among the old 
poets, — for to Ariosto she assigned a far lower place, — Alfieri 
and Manzoni, among the new. But what was of still more 
import to her education, she had read German books, and, for 
the three years before I knew her, almost exclusively, — Les- 
sing, 1 Schiller, 2 Richter, 3 Tieck, Novalis, 4 and, above all, 
Goethe." 5 

Beside the authors mentioned in Clarke's and Emerson's 
lists, she read somewhat of Uhland, Heine, Eichhorn, Jahn, 
De Wette and Herder. 6 These last two she translated one 
evening a week to Dr. Channing. 7 This was after she had 
begun teaching school in Boston. Here, among other sub- 
jects, she had classes in German and Italian. The Italian class 
read from Tasso, Petrarch, Ariosto, Alfieri, and " the whole 
hundred cantos of the Divina Commedia." 8 With her ad- 
vanced German class she read in Schiller, Goethe, Lessing, 
Tieck, and Richter. 9 

Of her German acquaintances it seems to have been Goethe 
who attracted her especially. In 1833 she wrote to Dr. Hedge : 
" I have with me the works of Goethe which I have not yet 
read, and am now engaged upon ' Kunst und Alterthum/ and 
' Campagne in Frankreich.' I still prefer Goethe to anyone, 
and, as I proceed, find more and more to learn." 10 And the 
year before she had made this confession : " It seems to me 
as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe. ... I 
am enchanted while I read. He comprehends every feeling 
I have ever had so perfectly, expresses it so beautifully ; . . . 

1 Ibid., 121. 

2 Ibid., 117 and 148. 

3 Ibid., 147 and 130. "How thoroughly am I converted to the love of 
Jean Paul." 

4 Ibid., 118 and 169. 

5 Ibid., 242. 
6 Higginson, 45. 

7 Memoirs, i, 175. 

8 Ibid., 174. 

9 Ibid., 174. Beside her regular classes she had private pupils, with one 
of whom she speaks of reading " the History of England Shakspeare's his- 
torical plays in connection." 

10 Ibid., 147; cf. Ibid., 117. 



100 

I persevere in reading the great sage, some part of every day, 
hoping the time will come, when I shall not feel so over- 
whelmed, and leave off this habit of wishing to grasp the 
whole, and be contented to learn a little every day, as becomes 
a pupil." 1 

Soon after learning German she had translated Goethe's 
Tasso, and her interest in Goethe became so great that later 
(in 1837), at the suggestion of George Ripley, she seriously 
contemplated writing his life. 2 Apropos of this and showing 
the spiritual stimulation she was receiving from her studies, 
she declared : 

" It will be long before I can give a distinct, and at the 
same time concise, account of my present state. I believe it 
is a great era. I am thinking now, — really thinking, I be- 
lieve ; certainly it seems as if I had never done so before. If 
it does not kill me, something will come of it. Never was my 
mind so active ; and the subjects are God, the universe, im- 
mortality. But shall I be fit for anything till I have abso- 
lutely re-educated myself? Am I, can I make myself, fit to 
write an account of half a century of the existence of one of 
the masterspirits of the world? It seems as if I had been 
very arrogant to dare to think it; yet will I not shrink back 
from what I have undertaken, — even by failure I shall learn 
much." 3 

Emerson's estimate of the influence of Goethe on Miss 

1 Ibid., 119. 

2 Some of her remarks on the subject of this contemplated work are of 
special interest as showing that Miss Fuller's plans for collecting materials 
included the consultation of original sources, books being actually sent her 
from Europe {Memoirs, i, 175), and that, as far as this undertaking went 
at least, she was not open to that charge of superficiality that could have 
been justly brought against much of the scholarship of the time. Her 
accuracy in this respect was revealed in early youth in a newspaper answer 
to an article in the North American by George Bancroft on the character 
of Brutus. 

Miss Fuller was obliged, for domestic reasons, to give up her plan of a 
life of Goethe. (Memoirs, i, 177.) In 1839, however, she published a 
translation of Eckermann's Conversations. (Ibid., 243.) Her paper on 
Goethe in the Dial (Vol. ii, p. 1) is one of the best of her critical essays. 

3 Memoirs, i, 128. 



101 

Fuller is undoubtedly exaggerated when he says that her 
study of him had left room in her mind for no other teacher. 1 
This is what he wrote of her to Carlyle in 1846 : 

" She is, I suppose, the earliest reader and lover of Goethe 
in this Country and nobody here knows him so well. Her 
love too of whatever is good in French and specially in Italian 
genius, give her the best title to travel. In short, she is our 
citizen of the world by quite special diploma." 2 

Thus far nothing in particular has been said of Miss Fuller's 
more technical philosophical reading. In 1825 we found her 
reading " Brown's Philosophy," and a little later contemplating 
Locke and trying Bacon. A letter on returning the book in 
1833 shows she had delved extensively in a French version of 
Plato, with delight if not always with logical conviction. She 
gives criticisms of various dialogues : 

" June 3, 1833. I part with Plato with regret. I could 
have wished to ' enchant myself,' as Socrates would say, with 
him some days longer. 

" ' Crito ' I have read only once, but like it. I have not got 
it in my heart though, so clearly as the others. 

" The ' Apology ' I deem only remarkable for the noble tone 
of sentiment, and beautiful calmness. I was much affected 
by Phaedo, but think the argument weak in many respects." 3 

In September, 1832, she thus expresses herself on the ques- 
tion of the value of philosophical studies : 

"Not see the use of metaphysics? A moderate portion, 
taken at stated intervals, I hold to be of much use as discipline 
of the faculties. I only object to them as having an absorbing 
and anti-productive tendency. . . . Time enough at six-and- 
twenty to form yourself into a metaphysical philosopher. The 
brain does not easily get too dry for that."* 

Somewhat later (" Groton ") she writes: "I have long 
had a suspicion that no mind can systematize its knowledge, 
and carry on the concentrating processes, without some fixed 

1 See Memoirs, i, 242. 

2 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, ii, 141. 

3 Memoirs, i, 116. 
*Ibid., 123. 



102 

opinion on the subject of metaphysics. But that indisposition, 
or even dread of the study, which you may remember, has 
kept me from meddling with it, till lately, in meditating on 
the life of Goethe, I thought I must get some idea of the 
history of philosophical opinion in Germany, that I might be 
able to judge of the influence it exercised upon his mind. . . . 
When I was in Cambridge, I got Fichte and Jacobi ; I was 
much interrupted, but some time and earnest thought I de- 
voted. Fichte I could not understand at all ; though the 
treatise which I read was one intended to be popular, and 
which he says must compel (bezwingen) to conviction. Jacobi 
I could understand in details, but not in system. It seemed 
to me that his mind must have been moulded by some other 
mind, with which I ought to be acquainted, in order to know 
him well, — perhaps Spinoza's. Since I came home, I have 
been consulting Buhle's and Tennemann's histories of philos- 
ophy, and dipping into Brown, Stewart, and that class of 
books." 1 

These last two quotations, together with the one earlier 
given about the " great era " when she was " really thinking," 
probably illustrate pretty fairly the evolution of her opinion 
on philosophy. The total impression left by an investigation 
of her studies is that Miss Fuller read less of the technically 
metaphysical 2 and on the whole had less of a liking for it than 
any of the other leading transcendentalists. Yet her interest 
in the problems and mysteries of life seems to have been hardly 
less on that account. She merely imbibed her philosophy more 
from other sources than from the professional metaphysicians. 

In concluding this consideration of Margaret Fuller's read- 
ing, two brief passages should be quoted, the first of which 
constitutes a confession of what our investigation has already 
suggested — that her mind, namely, possessed somewhat of 

1 Ibid., 127. Apropos of this experience and of Sir James Mackintosh 
she writes, " It is quite gratifying, after my late chagrin, to find Sir James, 
with all his metaphysical turn, and ardent desire to penetrate it, puzzling 
so over the German philosophy, and particularly what I was myself troubled 
about, at Cambridge, — Jacobi's letters to Fichte." Ibid., 165. 

2 E. g., that she did not know Berkeley, see Mrs. Dall, Margaret and Her 
Friends, 82. 



103 

that vagrant quality so often characteristic of the transcen- 
dental temperament : 

" Margaret said she could keep up no intimacy with books. 
She loved a book dearly for a while ; but as soon as she began 
to look out a nice Morocco cover for her favorite, she was 
sure to take a disgust to it, to outgrow it. She did not mean 
that she outgrew the author, but that, having received all from 
him that he could give her, he tired her. That had even been 
the case with Shakespeare ! For several years he was her very 
life ; then she gave him up. ... It was the same with Ovid, 
. . . She regretted her oddity, for she lost a great solace 
by it." 1 

The second passage, on the other hand, shows one of the 
purposes behind her reading, and affords at least a partial 
refutation of the charge, so frequently brought against her, 
that the only object of her studies was sel f -culture : 

" It has been one great object of my life to introduce here 
the works of those great geniuses, the flower and fruit of a 
higher state of development, which might give the young who 
are soon to constitute the state, a higher standard in thought 
and action than would be demanded of them by their own time. 
. . . I feel with satisfaction that I have done a good deal 
to extend the influence of the great minds of Germany and 
Italy among my compatriots." 2 

A word may here be added concerning the influence on 
Margaret Fuller of the other transcendentalists. It has been 
seen that she taught in Alcott's 3 school and that she came in 
close contact with Channing. 4 But it was the influence of 
Emerson that was earlier and stronger. The following refers 
to a time before she was personally acquainted with him: 
"You question me as to the nature of the benefits con- 
ferred upon me by Mr. E's preaching. I answer, that his 
influence has been more beneficial to me than that of any 

1 Mrs. Dall, Margaret and Her Friends, 139. 

2 Papers on Literature and Art, preface, vii. 

3 See Memoirs, i, 171, for the mutual impressions of each other of Alcott 
and Miss Fuller. 

'Ibid., 175. 



104 

American, and that from him I first learned what is meant by 
an inward life. Many other springs have since fed the 
stream of living waters, but he first opened the fountain. That 
the ' mind is its own place,' was a dead phrase to me, till 
he cast light upon my mind. Several of his sermons stand 
apart in memory, like landmarks of my spiritual history. It 
would take a volume to tell what this one influence did for 
me. But perhaps I shall some time see that it was best for 
me to be forced to help myself." 1 After listening to this it 
would evidently be superfluous to seek the ultimate source of 
Margaret Fuller's transcendentalism in Goethe or Coleridge or 
indeed anywhere beyond the Atlantic. 

Before attempting any summary of these sections on the 
reading of the transcendentalists, it may not be out of place 
to insert a few extracts and summaries from, the discussions 
by two of them, Emerson and Parker, of the influences which 
in their opinions contributed to the breaking up of tradition in 
New England during the first half of the nineteenth century. 
Emerson's discussion occurs in his paper, Historic Notes of 
Life and Letters in New England. 2 

He emphasizes first the growth of the modern idea (so 
opposite from that earlier prevalent) that the nation exists for 
the sake of the individual. " The most remarkable literary 
work of the age has for its hero and subject precisely this 
introversion; I mean the poem of Faust. 3 In philosophy, 
Immanuel Kant has made the best catalogue of the human 
faculties and the best analysis of the mind." Emerson then 
enumerates some of the forces and men that undermined the 
traditional religion in New England : the Arminians ; the Eng- 
lish theologians — followers of Locke in philosophy — Hartley, 
Priestley, and Belsham ; the life and writings of Swedenborg ; 
" the powerful influence of the genius and character of Dr. 
Channing." " Germany," he continues, " had created criticism 
in vain for us until 1820, when Edward Everett returned from 

1 Ibid. J 194. 
2 Works, x. 
9 Emerson did not like Faust; see Works, Centenary Edition, x, 573. 



105 

his five years in Europe." He then gives an extended account 
of the wide influence of this " master of elegance." " It was 
not the intellectual or the moral principles which he had to 
teach. It was not thoughts. . . . His power lay in the 
magic of form; it was in the graces of manner; in a new per- 
ception of Grecian beauty, to which he had opened our eyes." 
After mentioning Dr. Frothingham, " an excellent classical 
and German scholar," and Professor Andrews Norton, Emer- 
son asserts his belief that " the paramount source of the 
religious revolution was Modern Science." He explains espe- 
cially the disintegrating effect of the new astronomy and 
geology, and has somewhat to say of Goethe's innovations in 
optics and botany, and of the agitation over phrenology and 
mesmerism. Continuing, he speaks of Hegel, of Schelling, 
Oken, Combe's Constitution of Man, Dickens' novels, the 
essays of Channing, even the caricatures in Punch. The dis- 
cussion then turns to personal recollections of the transcen- 
dental group, an account of the Dial and of Brook Farm. 
One sentence occurring among his allusions to Fourier should 
be quoted : " Our feeling was that Fourier had skipped no fact 
but one, namely Life." 

Parker's discussion 1 is in some ways more specific and con- 
fined more immediately to the years just preceding the tran- 
scendental outburst. Of the spiritual influences most potent 
in his time, he mentions Garrison, Channing, Pierpont, and 
Emerson. Of the last he says, his brilliant genius " rose in the 
winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of 
ingenuous young people to look up at that great, new star, a 
beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while 
it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along 
new paths, and towards new hopes. America has seen no 
such sight before ; it is not less a blessed wonder now." Then, 
after a word about the phrenologists, he continues : 

" The writings of Wordsworth were becoming familiar to the 
thoughtful lovers of nature and of man, and drawing men to 
natural piety. Carlyle's works got reprinted at Boston, dif- 

1 A part of letter to his church, above referred to, reprinted in the 
appendix to Weiss's biography. 



106 

fusing a strong, and then also, a healthy influence on old and 
young. The writings of Coleridge were reprinted in America, 
all of them ' Aids to Reflection,' and brilliant with the scattered 
sparks of genius ; they incited many to think, more especially 
young Trinitarian ministers ; and, spite of the lack of both 
historic and philosophic accuracy, and the utter absence of 
all proportion in his writings ; spite of his haste, his vanity, 
prejudice, sophistry, confusion, and opium — he yet did great 
service in New England, helping to emancipate enthralled 
minds. The works of Cousin, more systematic, and more pro- 
found as a whole, and far more catholic and comprehensive, 
continental, not insular, in his range, also became familiar to 
the Americans, — reviews and translations going where the 
eloquent original was not heard — and helped free the young 
mind from the gross sensationalism of the academic Philosophy 
on one side, and the grosser supernaturalism of the ecclesi- 
astical Theology on the other. 

" The German language, hitherto the priceless treasure of 
a few, was becoming well known, and many were thereby 
made acquainted with the most original, deep, bold, com- 
prehensive, and wealthy literature in the world, full of theologic 
and philosophic thought. Thus, a great storehouse was opened 
to such as were earnestly in quest of Truth." 

With a reference to Strauss' Life of Jesus, 1 he passes on to 
a long description of the religious turmoil of the times. 2 

Into the wilderness of names with which this survey of the 
reading of these transcendentalists has surrounded us, how 
will it be possible to bring any meaning ? This very difficulty 
is replete with a meaning of its own, perhaps the most in- 
structive thing of all. 

1 See Chadwick's Parker, 83. 

2 To these discussions of Emerson and Parker may be appended a line 
or two from Dr. Hedge's account of the formation of the Transcendental 
Club: 

" The writings of Coleridge, recently edited by Marsh, and some of Car- 
lyle's earlier essays, especially the ' Characteristics ' and the ' Signs of 
the Times,' had created a ferment in the minds of some of the young clergy 
of that day. There was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual 
life." (Cabot, 245.) 



107 

Select at random a handful of names from those that we 
have come upon most often: Plato, Pythagoras, Plotinus, 
Shakespeare, Rousseau, Godwin, Kant, Coleridge, Goethe, 
Richter, Swedenborg. What is the significance of such a 
list? Or again, consider the influences which these men tell 
us were responsible early in life for first affording them their 
newer vision, or, that vision once gained, for finding them a 
firmer basis for their thought : Channing affirms that his earliest 
insight into the transcendental conception of the world came 
after reading Hutcheson, and that later the writings of Dr. 
Price helped him to formulate his metaphysical thinking. 
Alcott says that Coleridge lifted him out of his philosophical 
difficulties and gave his mind a turn toward the spiritual, while 
he speaks of Channing as his mentor when his thought was 
young. Emerson declares that he knows " but one solution 
to " his " nature and relations," the hint toward idealism — 
never afterward lost — which Berkeley gave him in his youth ; 
he attributes to Montaigne an influence scarcely consistent 
with the remark about Berkeley, and his early debt to Cole- 
ridge too is plain. Parker tells us it was Kant in whom he 
found the real basis for his newer views. Margaret Fuller 
says that it was Emerson who first taught her what the inward 
life is, though many other springs afterward fed the stream. 
Once more, what is the meaning of all this ? 

Surely these things show how various were the influences at 
work, how organically transcendentalism was a part of the 
thought currents of its own day, and how inseparably, like those 
currents themselves, it was linked with the thought of earlier 
times. Indeed, though it may seem equivalent to abandoning 
the inquiry as hopeless to say that the real origin of the move- 
ment was " influences in the air," to put it so would doubtless 
leave an impression much nearer the truth than to assign any 
one writer or group of writers as its source. Transcendental- 
ism was the product of the spirit of its age — like that spirit 
itself a function of many and complex forces, and, like that 
spirit again, to be understood only in relation to the history and 
temper of the scarcely less complex age from which it took its 
rise. Hence it is that transcendentalism seems from one point 



108 

of view a gradual outgrowth and culmination of Unitarianism ; 
that it is deeply and vitally intermingled with French Revolu- 
tionary influences ; that it connects at a score of points with 
English literary romanticism ; that it appears almost an offshoot 
of German philosophical idealism ; that it is intimately bound 
up with the growth of the scientific spirit ; that it is by no means 
unaffected by contemporary currents of social unrest. Indeed 
there is hardly an important radical movement of the time, 
political, social, scientific, literary, theological, or philosophical, 
to which transcendentalism can be shown to be essentially 
unrelated. 

Furthermore, the facility with which the transcendentalists 
found congenial food for reflection, not merely in Eastern scrip- 
tures, in Greek philosophy, and mediaeval mystics, but in a 
large part of all the greatest literature of the world, is highly 
significant, indicating that transcendentalism — in many ways 
even more than those larger European movements of which it 
was an aspect — was in no inconsiderable measure a renais- 
sance. 

Our study of their reading has tended to show that these 
transcendentalists share in common this interest in many of 
the great thinkers and much of the great literature of the 
world. 1 Perhaps the most marked of all transcendental man- 
nerisms is the startling collocation of names from all ages, all 
countries, all walks of life, names which the writer often treats 
with the utmost familiarity, although of the men themselves 
he could have known but little. This, it will be recognized, 
is particularly characteristic of Emerson: " Plato, Plotinus, 
Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth." 2 Such 
a list is of course in some ways exceedingly funny, and this 
sort of thing has been provocative of not a little scoffing. But 
he who is ready only to laugh has not begun to understand 
transcendentalism. This practice is much more than a mere 

1 This utterance of Parker is typically transcendental : " I would rather 
not waste my time on mean authors ; I would study the masters of poetry 
before I played with the apprentices and still more before I played with 
the lackeys of the apprentices." Frothkigham, 296. 

3 Works, vi, 150; see also e. g., Ibid., xii, 179, and Dial, i, 375^ 



109 

-nannerism of style ; it is symbolic of an attitude of thought ; 
lit is the counterpart, in the literary product, of certain habits 
of the transcendental mind, dangerous habits, perhaps, yet 
habits, under the circumstances, perfectly natural and intel- 
ligible. 1 Finding many of the same ideas in men separated 
by the widest distances in time and space — Orientals, Plato, 
Jesus, Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, Coleridge — these tran- 
scendentalists became imbued with a feeling of the identity 
rather than the diversity of the great thought of the world, 
with a belief that all religions are aspects of one religion, all 
philosophies of one philosophy. In other words they had 
awakened, possibly to a somewhat crude, but to a very real 
and sincere cosmopolitanism. They differed radically in the 
thoroughness with which they had investigated the grounds 
of their belief, in their actual knowledge of world literature; 
but they agreed quite definitely in the belief and enthusiasm 
itself : 

" A marked aspect of our day is its recovery and recogni- 
tion of past times and great names, — of Plato, Aristotle, Con- 
fucius, Behmen, Shakespeare, Goethe ; and some moderns are 
becoming of new account." 2 

" The more liberal thought of intelligent persons acquires a 
new name in each period or community; and in ours, by no 
very good luck, as it sometimes appears to us, has been desig- 
nated as transcendentalism. We have every day occasion to 
remark its perfect identity, under whatever new phraseology 
or application to new facts, with the liberal thought of all men 
of a religious and contemplative habit in other times and 
countries." 3 

" Any history of philosophy fortifies my faith, by showing 
me that what high dogmas I had supposed were the rare and 
late fruit of a cumulative culture, and only now possible to 
some recent Kant or Fichte, — were the prompt improvisations 
of the earliest inquirers ; of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and 
Xenophanes. In view of these students, the soul seems to 

1 For further discussion of this point, see the concluding chapter. 

2 Alcott, quoted in Sanborn, 414. 

3 Emerson, in the Dial, ii, 382. 



110 

whisper, ' There is a better way than this indolent learning of 
another. Leave me alone ; do not teach me out of Leibnitz 
or Schelling, and I shall find it all out myself.' "* 

" A great deal of the profoundest thinking of antiquity, 
which had become as good as obsolete for us, is now reappear- 
ing in extracts and allusions, and in twenty years will get all 
printed anew." 2 

But now from this insistence on the complexity of the 
sources of transcendentalism and on the impossibility of as- 
signing absolutely their respective importance, it is neverthe- 
less proper to recur to an acknowledgment of the large element 
of truth in the widely accepted theory that New England trans- 
cendentalism was a German importation. The extent of the 
admissible generalization seems to be this. The original 
stimulus to the strictly metaphysical part of transcendental 
thought came fairly largely (but by no means exclusively) 
from Germany. Of the various channels which brought this 
thought from Germany to America, England was considerably 
the most important, and France next. 

Of the English writers who helped in this transference, 
Coleridge 3 on the whole seems to have been the most imme- 
diately and widely influential. Merely to place side by side 
a few facts from our study is sufficient to show that — though 
others meant more to this or that transcendentalist — in really 
significant influence on the whole group no other writer can 
be ranked higher than Coleridge, and probably none so high 
as he. To Coleridge, Channing said that he " owed more 
than to the mind of any other philosophic thinker." Cole- 
ridge helped Alcott out of his philosophic difficulties. Emer- 
son " got all that earlier from Coleridge." Parker read Cole- 
ridge back in his school-keeping days and bore testimony to 
his great service to New England in helping emancipate en- 
thralled minds. Margaret Fuller read Coleridge early, and 
later pronounced the benefits he had conferred upon the age 
" as yet incalculable." The widespread influence of Coleridge 

1 Emerson, Works, i, 156. 

2 Ibid., 261. See also Frothingham's Parker, 296. 

3 See article on Coleridge, Christian Examiner, March, 1833. 



Ill 

meant that indirectly many of the elements of the philosophy 
of Schelling were broadly disseminated, and New England 
transcendentalism, in so far as it is a metaphysical system, 
has probably a closer affinity to his philosophy than to that of 
any of the other German idealists. After Coleridge, Words- 
worth and Carlyle must be given the next rank. Words- 
worth's influence was more subtle than Coleridge's, and may 
possibly have been just as pervasive. The seeds, at least, of 
transcendentalism were pretty thickly sown before Carlyle 
appeared, but his contribution too was great. 1 

Of French writers who helped to carry German thought, 
the most important were probably Mme. De Stael, Cousin, and 
Jouffroy, and of these the second seems to have been the most 
widely read. 2 

So much then for the incentive supplied from Germany. 
But now, this original stimulus once imparted, these trans- 
cendentalists drew from such widely different springs that all 
attempts at generalization must break down, except such as 
emphasize the very variety of their sources. Alcott's fountain 
of inspiration after the first seems to have been mainly the 
Greek philosophers, the Neo-Platonists, and the mystical 
writers of all time. The German influence on him during the 
transcendental period was probably less than in the case of 
any of the other leaders of the movement. Emerson dipped 
into at least a little of almost everything from the Orientals 
and Plato down. Parker read voluminously in practically all 

1 See article on the influence of Carlyle in the Dial, ii, 131. 

2 An article in the Princeton Review, xi, 37, reviewing several transla- 
tions from Cousin, and Emerson's Divinity School Address, shows the wide 
influence Cousin was exerting and gives the views of a writer who dep- 
recated this influence. 

The following is from an article in the North American Review of July, 
1841, also reviewing three translations from Cousin, one of which was a 
part of Ripley's Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature: 

" The writings of Cousin form the popular philosophy of the day. Their 
success in this country is attested by the appearance of the three transla- 
tions, of which the titles are given above, one of which has already passed 
to a second edition and has been introduced as a text book in some of our 
principal colleges." 

See also Orestes A. Brownson's Life, Vol. 1, Chap. xix. 



112 

literatures and in many schools of philosophy. Margaret 
Fuller's reading seems to have been predominantly poetical 
and literary, and to have included less of the technically meta- 
physical than that of the others. Germany had a large direct 
influence upon her, Goethe coming as near as anyone to being 
her great name. It should be remarked, especially, that all 
these transcendentalists whom we have been considering knew 
and took delight in Plato. 

Finally, the mutual influence of these men on one another 
was strong, and, above all, must the very great effect of Chan- 
ning's thought and personality be given its due significance. 
If we may trust his statement that German philosophy never 
gave him a new idea, we perceive — and this gives us an op- 
portunity to sum up our discussion — that he drew much of 
his inspiration from a point fairly high up in the stream of 
eighteenth century tendency, at a place where, or close to 
where, the current of influence was still predominantly from 
England to the continent rather than in the reverse direction. 
Through Unitarianism then, and through Channing, who 
diverted a part of the Unitarian stream into a new channel, 
we may trace an essentially direct English current ending in 
transcendentalism. Into this perhaps relatively slender stream 
was turned the turbulent, but congenital volume of German 
and other continental waters, and into that united river the 
thought of former ages dropped — not, in the image of Emer- 
son's poem, like ordinary rain, but like veritable cloudbursts. 



CHAPTER III 

The Transcendentalists and Practical Life, I 

The popular meaning of transcendental; some of the absurdities of 
the movement; mysticism and sentimentalism ; transcendental and 
prophetic pride; the transcendentalists and practical life. 

On September 26, 1840, Carlyle wrote to Emerson : " The 
Dial No. 1 came duly: of course I read it with interest; it is 
the utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land; pure, 
ethereal, as the voices of the Morning! And yet — you know 
me — for me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic : all theory 
becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, un- 
satisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me ! I will have all 
things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are 
to have my sympathy." 1 

In this quotation, a single example from many similar utter- 
ances of Carlyle, is embodied — as was indicated at the begin- 
ning of our discussion in what was said of the popular use of 
transcendental — the most frequent and at the same time most 
definite of the adverse criticisms which have been brought 
against the New England transcendentalists, the charge that 
they were out of touch with the concrete things of the prac- 
tical world, in a word that they were " lost in the clouds." 
These sentences then, which Carlyle applies here merely to 
the Dial, may be selected as an excellent expression (in tem- 
perate form, to be sure!) of the general criticism. 

This general criticism took several more specific shapes. 
The transcendentalists, it was declared, were idle dreamers, 
lovers of solitude, the slaves and victims of their own emo- 
tions, of a mysticism that, whatever beautiful visions it might 
bring, unfitted them, hopelessly, for any practical contact with 
the world or any useful service to mankind ; this mystical iso- 

1 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i, 330. 

9 113 



114 

lation bred in them, it was asserted, intellectual self-sufficiency 
and pride, individualism pushed to a well-nigh insane extreme ; 
this intellectual self-centralization, again, blinded them to facts, 
to the evil, the ugliness, and sin within the world; the very- 
absurdities of which they were guilty, finally, were sufficient 
to show their lack of a really balanced view of life. These — 
all of them variations on a single theme — are grave charges. 
Each demands its own consideration. 

It is clear that the final appeal in this whole matter must be 
simply to the facts — in the widest sense — of these men's lives. 
That is the logical court of last resort. Our trial of the trans- 
cendentalists before that bar, however, is reserved for the next 
chapter. In this, meanwhile, it is proposed to consider sev- 
eral of these specific charges just enumerated, to examine in 
a way the evidence on which they rest, with an aim more im- 
mediately to understand than to pass judgment — though the 
postponement of the larger discussion does not mean of course 
the exclusion of all biographical material from the present 
more restricted one. 

Let us proceed at once then to a consideration of one of the 
counts of the indictment. We shall take up the last one first 
— the question of the absurdities of which the transcendental- 
ists are alleged to have been guilty — confining our attention 
mainly, in this chapter, to their " conversations " and their 
published writings. 

I 

The currency of the term " transcendental " in the popular 
sense, and indeed the whole humorous aspect which for the 
public the movement took on, were due in good measure to 
men and events apart from those now being treated, whether 
they were the vagaries of some " Come-outer," some perhaps 
apocryphal anecdote about the poet Jones Very, 1 whom the 
inmates of the Somerville Insane Asylum are said to have 
thanked for the good he had done them, or stories of plowing 
poets and dish-washing philosophers at Brook Farm. But 
even the leading transcendentalists were thoughtful enough, 

1 For an account of his " timeless " existence, see Sanborn, 295. 



115 

upon some occasions, to supply useful evidence to those who 
seemed to regard transcendentalism as simply a huge joke. 

Alcott beyond question was the most prominent contributor. 
The methods adopted in his Temple school and the publication 
of the Conversations with Children on the Gospels, his experi- 
ences at Fruitlands, his later " conversations," all did their 
share ; but doubtless, most of all, his Orphic Sayings in the 
Dial. It will surely be no exaggeration to say that these, 
more than all the other contributions to the Dial combined, 
served to bring down the ridicule of the community without 
discrimination on its pages. Margaret Fuller's " conversa- 
tions " took their place in this respect beside Alcott's, while 
the material for the wits supplied by Emerson was perhaps 
certain passages in some of his earlier essays. (In Channing 
and Parker, as far as the writer is aware, there is nothing of 
this sort.) 

By way of a few illustrations of these points, we might, to 
begin with, call attention to a little book, Margaret and Her 
Friends, reporting the conversations (1841) of Miss Fuller on 
Greek mythology. In its pages among other things are men- 
tioned the sad consequences resulting from long gazing on the 
moonlight — or sleeping in it — and of a town where sixteen 
persons were bewildered in this way. If to some future age 
this document alone should descend to tell the story of the 
transcendental movement in New England, we can imagine 
some far-off reader wondering whether the town referred to 
might not have been Boston and whether the number of the 
moonstruck had not been underestimated. In fact in reading 
it one is maliciously reminded of Theodore Parker's remark 
about the transcendental nonsense " twaddled " by Margaret 
Fuller. To say this is not to infer that there was not much 
serious, even deep thought in these conversations, nor that 
those of others of the five years during which they were con- 
ducted 1 were necessarily as ethereal as those on mythology, the 
report of which we have ; least of all is it to imply that they 
were not of real benefit and inspiration to those who attended 
them. We have personal testimony on the contrary that they 

1 For the subjects during the other years, see p. 40. 



116 

were. Behind the mist of absurdly forced symbolism was 
always sincerity, always pure aspiration. 

It is manifestly impossible to make extracts from these con- 
versations without on the one hand failing to do justice to 
their serious intentions, or on the other, decreasing, from the 
lack of context, the humorous effect. A few short specimens, 
however, may be set down: 

" R. W. E. thought every man had probably met his Jupiter, 
Juno, Minerva, Venus, or Ceres in society! 

" Margaret was sure she never had ! 

" R. W. E. explained : ' Not in the world, but each on his 
own platform.' 

" William Story objected. The life of an individual was 
not universal ( !) 

" Sophia Ripley repeated, ' The inner life/ 

" William Story claimed to be an individual, and did not 
think individual experience could ever meet all minds, . . . 
like the story of Ceres for example. . . . 

" Emerson said that we all did sundry graceful acts, in our 
caps and tunics, which we never could do again, which we 
never wanted to do again. 

" Margaret said, at last we had touched the point. . . . 

" Margaret . . . declared that . . . yEsculapius bore two 
[serpents] on his staff, Mercury two on his divining rod, and 
the cock was also sacred to yEsculapius. 

" I asked if this did not indicate a certain subjection of these 
Gods to Wisdom? 

" Some questions written on paper were here read. One 
asked why Minerva was born of the stroke of Vulcan, and 
why she was the patroness of weavers, and what that had 
to do with the story of Arachne. 

" Margaret replied with ill temper to the first, that it was 
because Vulcan held the hammer — and to the second, that she 
did not know. 

" Ida Russell thought that when Mechanic Art was married 
to Beauty, it might charm even Wisdom." 

It is only fair to remark that all the participants in these 



117 

conversations were not unconscious of the fun — Emerson and 
Margaret Fuller herself among others — but this fact cannot 
suffice as an explanation, for the tickets for ten sessions cost 
twenty dollars. 

Alcott's conversations of the transcendental period, as far 
as we know them, appear to have had even more of the 
naively humorous element than Miss Fuller's, as, for instance, 
that on Enthusiasm as reported — from the notes of a member 
of the class — in Concord Days. This, with its " insights " 
concerning " temperaments " and " complexions "* is suffi- 
ciently described by the phrase which Alcott himself in this 
very conversation, with deliciously unconscious irony, applies 
to the method of the seer, " thought a-bed, or philosophy re- 
cumbent." While the discussion of Alcott's Temple school 
and his conversations with children is reserved till later, a 
single quotation here from one of these conversations will be 
sufficient to show how well they justified the popular smiles, 
even if not the lack of popular sympathy. The following are 
the animadversions of a child under seven years of age : 

Josiah: " Mr. Alcott, we think too much about clay. We 
should think of Spirit. I think we should love Spirit, not 
Clay. I should think a mother now would love her baby's 
Spirit; and suppose it should die, that is only the Spirit 
bursting away out of the Body. It is alive; it is perfectly 
happy. I really do not know why people mourn when their 
friends die. I should think it would be matter of rejoicing. 
[This, we are constrained to believe, is the ne plus ultra of 
transcendental optimism.] For instance: now, if we should 
go out into the street and find a box — an old dusty box — and 
should put into it some very fine pearls, and by and by the 
box should grow old and break, why, we should not even 
think about the box; but if the pearls were safe, we should 
think of them and nothing else. So it is with the Soul and 
Body. I cannot see why people mourn for bodies." 

1 " The celestial man was composed more largely of light and ether. The 
demonic man combined more of fire and vapor. The animal man more of 
embers and dust." Concord Days, 192. 



118 

Mr. Alcott: " Yes, Josiah ; that is all true and we are glad 
to hear it. 1 Shall some one else now speak beside you ? " 2 

Josiah: " Oh, Mr. Alcott ! then I will stay in the recess and 
talk." 3 

This is said to be a verbatim record. 4 Evidently Josiah had 
caught the true transcendental loquacity. 

The presence in not inconsiderable degree in Alcott's writ- 
ings, especially in their more speculative portions, of phrases 
and sentences that inevitably provoke a smile is to be accounted 
for much less by the character of the thought than by the 
simple fact that Alcott was very far from being a master of 
expression. 5 When Wordsworth writes: 

" Thou, over whom thy immortality 
Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave, 
A presence which is not to be put by ; 
Thou little child, yet glorious in the might 
Of heaven-born freedom, on thy being's height," 

whether we give intellectual assent or not, we feel that this 
is great and serious poetry. But when one reads in Alcott, 
" Children are illuminated text-books, breviaries of doctrine, 
living bodies of divinity, open always and inviting their elders 
to peruse the characters inscribed on the lovely leaves," 6 
though the thought is well-nigh the same, good manners 
deter us from making comments in public. And dozens of 
other examples of this sort of thing could be picked out from 
Alcott's writings. We take a single specimen from Tablets: 
" Pursuing our peregrinations, we plunge suddenly into the 
abyss of origins, transformed for the moment into slumbering 
umbilici, skirting the shores of our nativity ; or ascending 
spine-wise, traverse the hierarchy of gifts." 7 The Orphic 
Sayings are frequently in a style quite similar to this. 8 

1 If " Josiah " was, as is presumable, Josiah Quincy, then a remark of 
Emerson would lead us to believe that he gave assent to this sort of thing. 

2 Josiah had been usurping the conversation. 

3 Concord Days, io6-. 

4 See note 2, p. 119. 

6 It is true that late in life his powers of expression were increased. 

6 Table Talk, 57. 

7 Tablets, 202. 

8 See p. 131, where one of these Sayings is quoted in full. 



119 

The same element appears in Emerson, but much less fre- 
quently. We find distinct traces of it in Nature, as for in- 
stance where his orphic poet (supposedly Alcott) "sings": 
" ' Man is the dwarf of himself. . . . Out from him sprang 
the sun and moon ; from man the sun, from woman the 
moon,' " or where he says on his own account, " I became a 
transparent eyeball." The point again is that such a state- 
ment as this last is ridiculous quite apart from its truth or 
falsity. We may agree entirely or we may disagree with the 
philosophic thought, but we must surely admit that the sentence 
is grossly unpoetic 1 and wholly deserving of the cartoons it 
called forth. 

The Scylla and the Charybdis of criticism on this whole 
matter are on the one hand to feel that the thought is 
true and thence to infer that the expression of it cannot be 
ridiculous, and on the other to perceive the ridiculousness of 
the expression and thence to infer that there can be no serious 
or worthy thought beneath it. Emerson — with some few 
lapses — is both poet and philosopher. Alcott made the mis- 
take of attempting the untechnical, poetical method of philos- 
ophizing, without possessing the poet's power of expression. 2 
This fact in itself is sufficient to prevent his writings from 
having great influence on the world. 

Even this brief glance at some of the unconsciously humor- 
ous aspects of transcendentalism ought to be sufficient to show 
that there was more than a grain of justification in the popular 
attitude, and that while the public was wrong in its wide and 
promiscuously applied generalizations from little things, it was 
right in perceiving that the ridiculous element was there. The 
criticism which has failed to find it is obviously one-sided. 
Our short survey would seem to indicate too that more than 
in any other way (in their writings) these men laid them- 

1 Contrast e. g., with Brahma, where the mystical thought and imagery 
are fused with high poetic art. Brahma in turn may be contrasted in this 
respect with Alcott's analogous lines beginning : 

" He omnipresent is, 
All round himself he lies." 
{Tablets, 167.) 

2 See Sanborn, 259, for Emerson's criticism of Alcott's style. 



120 

selves open to well-grounded satire through a tendency to 
indulge in absurdly expressed utterances of a symbolic or 
highly figurative nature. What the significance of this ten- 
dency was, we may best consider at the end of the chapter. 
Meanwhile the fact of its existence is clear. That it is an 
inevitable attendant of the transcendental point of view is 
disproved by its absence in Channing and Parker. While it 
is infrequent in Emerson's writings, the reports of Miss 
Fuller's conversations make clear that he was quite capable 
of entering into the spirit of those meetings and even con- 
tributing his share; and his long intimacy with Alcott shows 
that he must have much more than merely tolerated the sort 
of thing to which we refer. The records of her conversa- 
tions leave us in no doubt as to the presence of this element 
in Margaret Fuller, though, as with Emerson, it is found, 
at the most, very infrequently in her published writings. Of 
Alcott alone can it be said that it is present in a fairly con- 
spicuous degree in his publications. On the whole, then, this 
quality cannot be set down as a primary transcendental char- 
acteristic, but is one, however, that did show a marked ten- 
dency to emerge in connection with the thoughts and spirit 
of these men. 

II. 

How far, we next ask, were the transcendentalists victims 
of over-emotionalism? Of sentimentalism ? Of mysticism? 
A consideration of simply this last question, How far were 
the transcendentalists mystics? will perhaps, incidentally, sug- 
gest answers to the other two. 

Professor William James in his Gifford Lectures, The 
Varieties of Religious Experience, proposes " four marks 
which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling 
it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures." Though, 
as the last phrase indicates, Professor James makes no claim 
that his analysis involves a final definition of mysticism, we 
surely cannot do better than to adopt it for our present dis- 
cussion. His four criteria are these: 

" i. I neff ability. — The handiest of the marks by which I 



121 

classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject 
of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no ade- 
quate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows 
from this that its quality must be directly experienced ; it can- 
not be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity 
mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states 
of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has 
never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of 
it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value 
of a symphony ; one must have been in love one's self to 
understand a lover's state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, 
we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are 
even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The 
mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an 
equally incompetent treatment. 

" 2. Noetic Quality. — Although so similar to states of feel- 
ing, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be 
also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into 
depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They 
are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and impor- 
tance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they 
carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time. 

" These two characters will entitle any state to be called 
mystical, in the sense in which I use the word. Two other 
qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found. 
These are : — 

" 3. Transiency. — Mystical states cannot be sustained for 
long. . . . 

" 4. Passivity. — . . . the mystic feels as if his own will 
were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped 
and held by a superior power. . . . "* 

(As does Professor James, we shall put emphasis upon the 
first two marks.) 

With this analysis of mysticism before us, we see at once 
why its appearance among the transcendentalists might in 
advance be reasonably predicted. If its nature be indeed in- 
effable emotion attended with intellectual illumination, its 

1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 380. 



122 

very essence then is a blending, in some sort, of thought and 
feeling. But we have pointed out repeatedly that the whole 
revolutionary age in Europe was characterized by a vital and 
widespread fusion of just these elements ; such a fusion 
indeed we have already declared transcendentalism itself — 
in part at least — to be, and the portion of our discussion on 
which we are now entering will supply not a little confirma- 
tion of this claim. Union of thought and feeling may take 
place of course in a wide variety of ways, but in the case of 
this New England movement there was more than one con- 
dition that favored the appearance of mysticism. That the 
transcendentalists.were without exception of highly developed 
emotional natures is beyond question 1 — to read even the briefest 
stories of their lives is to perceive this ; that they were all of 
a religious temperament is almost equally beyond denial ; and 
that they came to maturity at a time and in a place where a 
strictly active indulgence of high emotion received little en- 
couragement, our earlier chapters, we trust, have rendered 
plain. Here already are ingredients enough for making mys- 
tics. But more may be said. The philosophy of these men 
led in the same direction. (We will come in a moment to 
the objection which someone will raise that here we are getting 
the cart before the horse.) A natural corollary of the trans- 
cendental philosophy, with its belief in the immanence of God 
in man, is a belief in the possibility of the direct communion 
of the human soul with the divine. Aspiration is the reaching 
of the soul up to God; inspiration is the flowing of God into 
the soul; and these are one. It is easy to see how such a 
purely theoretical conception, if touched with emotion, might 
result in at least a degree, and where deeply tinctured with 
feeling, in a high degree, of mysticism. But this is not all. 
Not only does the content of the transcendental philosophy 
readily permit a mystical inference; its very method brings 
it even more closely into touch with states of rapture. All 
the transcendentalists adopted — in whatever varying degrees 
and kinds — the intuitional method of philosophizing; in other 

1 Emerson is by no means an exception to this statement in spite of the 
tranquil, sometimes even cold, element in his nature. 






123 

words they all accepted as authoritative, individual insights 
into spiritual truth. But the kinship between these insights 
and the " noetic " quality of mysticism is on the very face of 
things apparent. 

The moment a metaphysic sanctions an intuitional way of 
gaining truth, it has thrown open the doors into the deep world 
of feeling and mysticism. The very Critique of Practical 
Reason of Immanuel Kant holds within itself — whatever else it 
may contain in germ — the promise of a whole school of mys- 
tics. Philosophies of the transcendental type and certain 
forms of religious ecstacy have always shown a remarkable 
proneness to flourish together, and at the touch of emotion 
or in the heart of a fervid nature a belief of this sort stands 
always ready to put forth mystical blossoms. How far the 
philosophy nourishes the mysticism, how far the mysticism 
creates the philosophy — which one of us shall say? Each 
will answer according to his own philosophy of life. The 
two things are congenial, and he will be a bold judge indeed 
who attempts to cast up between them a final reckoning of 
causes and effects. 

Does not transcendentalism present this very problem? It 
surely does. To untangle its intellectual and emotional strands 
is hopelessly impossible. Let this at once be fully recognized, 
for to recognize and admit it is to transform an obstacle into 
an explanation. We come then to take up these men in 
turn, knowing at the outset that because of their highly 
emotional, religious natures and because of both the content 
and spirit of their philosophy, in all of them we have potential 
mystics. And here, perhaps, is the best place to remark, 
that so far as the popular charge against the transcendentalists 
means that they did not go to the facts of the external world 
for the basis of their beliefs, it stands confirmed at once and 
forever. The intuitional method in their own eyes, however, 
was not an abandoning of experience for theory but rather 
a shifting of emphasis to another sort of experience, that 
of the inner as contrasted with the outer world. 

The hyper-emotional, mystical temperament was Channing's 



124 

by nature. A bit of autobiography from a discourse delivered 
in his native town in 1836 will in itself fender this clear: 

" No spot on earth has helped to form me so much as that 
beach [at Newport]. There I lifted up my voice in praise 
amidst the tempest. There, softened by beauty, I poured out 
my thanksgiving and contrite confessions. There, in rever- 
ential sympathy with the mighty power around me, I be- 
came conscious of power within. There struggling thoughts 
and emotions broke forth, as if moved to utterance by nature's 
eloquence of the winds and waves. There began a happiness 
surpassing all worldly pleasures, all gifts of fortune, the 
happiness of communing w T ith the works of God." 1 

The following from a letter of self-confession to his friend 
Shaw shows the intensity of his emotional nature and at the 
same time his own determination to overcome it : 

" My whole life has been a struggle with my feelings. 
Last winter I thought myself victorious. But the earth-born 
Antaeus has risen stronger than ever. I repeat it, my whole 
life has been a struggle with my feelings. ... I can remember 
the days when I gloried in the moments of rapture, when I 
loved to shroud myself in the gloom of melancholy. You 
may remember them too. But I have grown wiser as I 
have grown older. I now wish to do good in the world." 

Speaking of " feeling," in this same letter he says : " I then 
went on to consider whether there were not many ' persons- 
who possessed this boasted feeling, but who were still de- 
ficient in active benevolence. A thousand instances 'occurred 
to me. I found myself among the number. ' It is true,' said 
I, ' that I sit in my study and shed tears over human misery. 
I weep over a novel. I weep over a tale of human woe. But 
do I ever relieve the distressed? Have I ever lightened the 
load of affliction?' My cheeks reddened at the question; a 
cloud of error burst from my mind. I found that virtue did 
not consist in feeling, but in acting from a sense of duty." 2 

1 See the whole of the discourse on Christian Worship, from which this 
quotation is taken, Works, iv, 303. Also Channing, 41 — " Thus I am 
either borne to heaven on ' rapture's wing of fire,' or else I am plunged 
into the depths of despair." 

2 Ibid., 60. 



125 

Advising a young friend late in life, he wrote : " Do any- 
thing innocent, rather than give yourself up to reverie. I 
can speak on this point from experience. At one period of 
my life I was a dreamer, castle-builder. Visions of the dis- 
tant and future took the place of present duty and activity. 
I spent hours in reverie. I suppose I was seduced in part by 
physical debility ; but the body suffered as much as the mind." 1 
And in another place : " I wasted a good deal of my early life 
in reverie, and broke the habit only by painful self-conflict. 
I felt that my powers were running wild, and my religious 
principles were infinitely important to me in giving me the 
victory." 2 

These quotations show distinctly that Channing, in early 
life at least, was far from being free from sentimentalism. 
Only the first of them, however, contains a reference to any- 
thing approaching an attendant spiritual illumination, and 
even this suggests rather than proves the presence of genuine 
mysticism. But another experience of Channing, to which we 
made an earlier allusion, 3 may well have been more truly mys- 
tical — we mean the one which came to him after reading 
Hutcheson. The account we have is not sufficiently detailed 
to warrant a really confident judgment, but it is clear that it 
was at least this : an experience of high emotional exaltation 
attended with what was believed to be a vivid and profound 
perception of spiritual truth. 

It is clear that there was less of the mystical in Theodore 
Parker than in any of the other leading transcendentalists. 
Indeed, his active, fact-loving temperament was in not a few 
respects the exact opposite -of that of the mystic. In him 
there was no tendency — to use the words he himself employed 
in warning another — to " dwell amid the sentimental flowers 
of religion, charmed by their loveliness and half bewildered by 
their perfume." But he did have, what we have said these 
men possessed in common, a highly emotional nature, and 

i Ibid., 58. 
2 Ibid., 59. 
8 P. 45- 



126 

confidence in the validity of spiritual intuitions ; and his belief 
in the possibility of the soul's immediate communion with God 
yields to that of few mystics in sincerity and fervor, as his 
prayers are in themselves enough to show. 

There can be no doubt of the existence of genuine mysticism 
in Emerson's nature. A number of passages in his essays are 
plain attempts to convey something of the ineffableness of 
experiences he has undergone, and the very way in which he 
refers to mysticism reveals that the sentences were written by 
a man who had himself known states of the same general sort. 
" Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the 
soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships 
God, becomes God ; yet for ever and ever the influx of this 
better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires 
awe and astonishment." Passages like this are of far from 
infrequent occurrence in Emerson's writings. 

In our discussion of his reading — of his interest in the Ori- 
entals, the Neo-Platonists, Boehme, and Swedenborg — his 
deep mystical sympathies have been already to some extent set 
forth. It is especially in the essay on The Over Soul, also in 
certain passages in Nature, in the address on The Method of 
Nature, and in some of the poems, that Emerson's capacity 
for ecstacy and his praise of it as " the law and cause of 
nature "* are manifested ; and a very marked and undeniable 
capacity it is. In the essay on Books, after his enumeration 
of the great bibles of the world, he characterizes them as 
" majestic expressions of the universal conscience . . . more 
to our daily purpose than this year's almanac or this day's 
newspaper. . . . they are for the closet, and to be read on 
the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given 
or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the 
glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart." But none 
of his writings show his kindred feeling for this " Infinitude 
of the Asiatic Soul " more completely than the little poem 
Brahma. 2 

1 Works, i, 204. 

2 See p. 73. 



127 

The essay on Swedenborg, or the Mystic gives perhaps the 
best idea of Emerson's own views on mysticism i 1 

" All religious history contains traces of the trances of 
saints — a beatitude, but without any sign of joy ; earnest, soli- 
tary, even sad; . . . The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Por- 
phyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, 
will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind 
is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in 
terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. 

' It o'er informs the tenement of clay,' 

and drives the man mad ; or gives a certain violent bias which 
taints his judgment. In the chief examples of religious illu- 
mination somewhat morbid has mingled, in spite of the un- 
questionable increase of mental power." 2 

These various passages reveal that Emerson had a deep 
sympathy with this class of writers, and that his own nature 
was, to say the least, deeply tinged with the mystical. They 
show too that he felt that these things held a danger within 
them. There is no evidence that he himself ever experienced 
any extreme degree of mystical ecstacy, but to show how far 
he was capable of carrying, not the rapturous, but the purely 
contemplative mood, an entry in his Journal for November 9, 
1841, may be quoted: 

" I read little, I write little. I seek, but with only my usual 
gipsy diligence, to drive my loitering troops metaphysical into 
phalanx, into line, into section ; . . . Gray clouds, short 
days, moonless nights, a drowsy sense of being dragged easily 
somewhere by that locomotive Destiny, which, never seen, we 
yet know must be hitched on to the cars wherein we sit — that 
is all that appears in these November weeks. Let us hope 
that, as often as we have defamed days which turned out to 
be benefactors, and were whispering oracles in the very dron- 
ing nurses' lullabies which soothed us to sleep, so this may 
prove a profitable time." 3 

1 See also Works, iii, 37 ; viii, 250. 

2 Ibid., iv, 95. 

3 Cabot, 468. 



128 

The presence of Professor James' " mark " of " passivity," 
the abeyance of the individual will, is conspicuous here. 

The emotional element in Margaret Fuller's nature was 
excessive. In the account of her early life we see her intense 
capacity for feeling. In the story of her school days at Groton 
in the romance Mariana, 1 Mariana represents Margaret her- 
self ; 2 and in some of the incidents of the tale we catch glimpses 
of the high-strung nature of the girl, as, for instance, where 
Mariana goes into convulsions as the result of a practical joke, 
or again where, discovered in falsehood and unable to defend 
herself, she " threw herself down with all her force against 
the iron hearth, on which a fire was burning, and was taken 
up senseless." But, although much of the over-emotional 
tendency of Miss Fuller — as in the case of Channing's early 
life — must be called mere sentimentalism, it is clear that there 
was genuine mysticism in it too. At least once in her life, 
Thanksgiving Day, 1831, she had an experience which seems 
to have approached the " union " of the Neo-Platonists and 
old mystics. Her description — far too long to quote in full — 
leaves no possible doubt as to the nature of this experience. 
We select merely two sentences : " I was for that hour taken 
up into God. In that true ray most of the relations of earth 
seemed mere films, phenomena." 3 From this hour she dates — 
and apparently with truth — a radical change in her own char- 
acter. Another experience in 1840 4 appears to have been 
somewhat similar. 5 

In hardly anything she has left is the intensity of the emo- 
tional side of Miss Fuller's nature so completely embodied as 
in a letter addressed to Beethoven, 6 written after an evening 
at the Boston Academy of Music. One must read it all to 
obtain the real effect, but even a few lines show how in the 

1 Included in Summer on the Lakes. 

2 Higginson, 198. 

3 Memoirs, i, 141 ; a longer passage from her description is quoted below, 
p. 136. 

*Ibid„ 308. 

5 See on this whole subject, Ibid., ii, 94. 

6 Ibid., i, 232. 



129 

pure emotion of music she found the truest utterance of this 
" ineffable " element within her : 

" Thou art to me beyond compare, for thou art all I want. 
No heavenly sweetness of saint or martyr, no many-leaved 
Raphael, no golden Plato, is anything to me, compared with 
thee. The infinite Shakespeare, the stern Angelo, Dante, — 
bitter sweet like thee, — are no longer seen in thy presence. 
And, beside these names, there are none that could vibrate in 
thy crystal sphere. Thou hast all of them, and that ample 
surge of life besides, that great winged being which they only 
dreamed of." 

It is to be noticed that, especially as she grew older, she 
recognized the danger of this high emotionalism, regretted it, 
and struggled consciously and bravely against it: 

"... the thoughts I had, with the swell of their religion, 
kept me awake all night, and thus I was unfit to meet a very 
fatiguing day, and last night, tired and with headache, could 
not write. Thus it so often is. Feeling keeps from doing 
what should show it." 1 

" I am in danger of giving myself up to experiences till 
they so steep me in ideal passion that the desired goal is for- 
gotten in the rich present. Yet I think I am learning how 
to use life more wisely." 2 

Highly as the ecstatic temperament was developed in Mar- 
garet Fuller, it is Bronson Alcott who remains the true repre- 
sentative of mysticism among the leading transcendentalists. 
He it was who had read most deeply in the ancient and mod- 
ern mystics, and who had openly embraced their peculiar form 
of transcendental philosophy. His experiences show all the 
marks of genuine mysticism. 

Mr. Harris gives an account of Alcott's trances ; surely none 
of the other leading transcendentalists was capable of any- 
thing approaching this: 

" I think Mr. Alcott has not preserved in written form the 

1 Love Letters of Margaret Fuller, letter xxiii. This whole book is an 
excellent revelation of her emotional nature. 

2 Memoirs, ii, 94. 

10 



130 

insights which he had at the time of his illumination. As he 
intimated to me, that period was one of such long-continued 
exaltation that his bodily strength gave way under it; and his 
visions of truth came to have mingled with them spectres 
which he perceived to be due to physical exhaustion. He saw 
the entire world as one vast spinal column. . . . He told me 
that when he had become almost deranged in his mind through 
this long-continued period of exaltation and insight into the 
spine as the type of all nature, and when he had begun to see 
spectres* his wife ' packed him up and sent him down to visit 
Mr. Emerson.' I therefore conceive this insight into the sym- 
bolic significance of the spine to be directly connected with his 
studies in Swedenborg." 1 « 

After this, it may seem that nothing can remain to be said, 
and surely nothing does — toward proving Alcott's mysticism. 
The world will not weep at his failure to record his insights 
concerning the spine. But it is easy to carry the inference 
too far, to suppose that all Alcott said or wrote was the prod- 
uct of similar excessively exalted states, tainted therefore with 
a sort of insanity, and worthless. This was not the case ; and 
furthermore it does not dispose of a belief merely to call it 
mystical — as works like that of Professor James amply dem- 
onstrate. 

The readiness with which not a few critics of transcenden- 
talism have adopted practically this attitude of supposing that 
the slightest tinge of mysticism is sufficient to reduce a man 
or a belief to the realm of the ridiculous justifies a word in 
general on this point. 

That element in human nature which the word " mystical " 
hints at, but only partially conveys, is one that even the life 
around us in a practical age proves we cannot neglect. Much 
more does the history of philosophy and religion and the whole 
voice of the East proclaim this truth. If we wish to be nar- 
rowly occidental, we may content ourselves with laughing at 
these things, but has that man the right to judge such utter- 
ances as Alcott's Orphic Sayings who comes to the task openly 
priding himself on the fact that his nature has never been 

1 Sanborn, 556. 



131 

stained with such illusions? Let us admit that these Sayings 
are just as unsuited to the needs of the everyday American 
world as they have been considered; that there is reason for 
much of the ridicule that has been heaped upon them. But let 
us not declare, as has been so often done, that no one ever 
understood them, probably not even Alcott himself. For any- 
one who has not at least in some degree appreciated Neo- 
Platonism and the " lapse " explanation of evil and finite 
things, almost all of the Orphic Sayings are nonsense ; but let 
one gain even a momentary insight into this philosophy, and 
nearly all of them become intelligible, and not a few much 
more than that. 

Let us take a single example. The following may be the 
work of a mystic, but surely it is not mere fancy to see in its 
latter sentences the doctrine of the Unmoved Mover of as 
empirical a philosopher as Aristotle : 

" XLIII. Genesis. — The popular genesis is historical. It 
is written to sense, not to the soul. Two principles, diverse 
and alien, interchange the Godhead, and sway the world by 
turns. God is dual. Spirit is derivative. Identity halts in 
diversity. Unity is actual merely. The poles of things are 
not integrated : creation globed and orbed. Yet in the true 
genesis, nature is globed in the material, souls orbed in the 
spiritual firmament. Love globes, wisdom orbs, all things. 
As magnet the steel, so spirit attracts matter, which trembles 
to transverse the poles of diversity, and rest in the bosom of 
unity. All genesis is of love. Wisdom is her form ; beauty 
her costume." 1 

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the thought of this 
saying, one can hardly fail to smile ; and this suggests that we 
have here another case of what we noticed at the beginning 
of the chapter, and that what provokes the mirth may lie less 
in the thought than the expression. 

It is clear, then, as we look back, that mystical elements 
appear fairly conspicuously in the transcendentalists. With 
Parker alone we may hesitate to connect the term — even 

1 Dial J i, 96. 



132 

though we remember the sincerity and fervor with which he 
believed in spiritual intuition and in the soul's immediate com' 
munion with God in the act of prayer. In Channing a prone- 
ness toward reverie was marked — especially in youth. It was 
largely mingled then with mere sentimentalism, but verged at 
times probably on the truly mystical. In Emerson this ele- 
ment was considerable, but in him it consisted especially in 
an intellectual sympathy with the mystical philosophers, and 
more in a tendency to excess of contemplation than to rapture. 
Margaret Fuller's nature was through and through ecstatic, 
and she experienced states of mystical illumination; but with 
her too, as with Channing, this element especially in youth 
was blended with a more ordinary sentimentalism. Alcott 
went further even than Miss Fuller, and among those under 
discussion is the extreme type of transcendental mysticism, in 
whom the temperament seems once, at the very least, to have 
induced a state closely verging on the pathological. It should 
not fail to be remarked that in the cases of Channing and 
Miss Fuller certain of these experiences appear to have been 
intimately connected with critical moments in their moral 
development. 

But all the evidence bearing on this subject has not yet been 
presented. It has been deemed best to consider part of it 
under another heading, and the relation to mysticism and es- 
pecially to the "noetic" quality of mysticism of what is now 
to be said of " transcendental and prophetic pride " cannot fail 
to be easily perceived. 

Ill 

How far were the transcendentalists guilty of intellectual 
self-sufficiency? How far was their individualism so aggres- 
sive as to arouse a natural antagonism? 

The belief of these men in the immanence of divinity in 
humanity gave rise to a sense of " the sufficiency of man for 
all his functions " and consequently to a doctrine of self- 
reliance. This philosophy perhaps, or perhaps even more the 
kind of character on which it was grafted (the implied ques- 
tion we may waive at present), resulted in a certain quality 



133 

which, though its manifestation in different natures varied 
greatly, was so fundamentally the same in all that we may 
almost be justified in calling it " transcendental pride." (Per- 
haps " pride " is an unsatisfactory word, but there seems to 
be no better.) These men all believed — and believed with 
high sincerity — that more than in anything else the ameliora- 
tion of mankind lay in its gaining their own philosophical 
attitude toward the world and then in its carrying over that 
attitude into religion and life. Was it not natural, therefore, 
that they should have become imbued, just as they did, with 
a conviction of their important, in some cases almost prophetic 
mission to the world ? Yet concerning the genuine and funda- 
mental modesty of three of those whom we are treating, Chan- 
ning, Emerson and Parker, there can certainly be nothing but 
agreement. 

It would be superfluous to call to mind the almost painful 
self-effacement of Channing which, in his youth, was carried 
so far as seriously to undermine his health. Of his whole life 
in this respect the remark of his brother may stand as typical : 
" Never did I know him to be guilty of a selfish act, and 
he shrank from any mention of his incessant kindness, as if 
the least allusion to it gave him pain." 1 Yet in spite of his 
humility, Channing had a deep-rooted self-respect and self- 
reliance, flowing from his " one sublime idea," an idea summed 
up in the words, " I have no fear of expressing too strongly 
the connection between the divine and the human mind." 2 
" Never suffer your opinions to be treated with scorn in 
social intercourse, any more than you would your characters ; 
. . . Always feel yourself standing on the ground of equality 
with every sect' and party, and countenance none by your 
tameness, or by shrinking from your convictions, to assume 
toward you a tone of dictation, superiority, or scorn. . . . 
One of the great lessons taught me by experience is, that self- 
respect, founded, not on outward distinction, but on the essen- 
tial power and rights of human nature, is the guardian of 
virtue, and itself among the chief of virtues." 3 

1 Channing, in. 

2 Works, 295 (ed. 1877). 

3 Channing, 423; see Works, v, 313. 



134 

But another passage will come much nearer an explanation 
of what were the grounds of Channing's self-reliance, and of 
what, we cannot but believe, he considered his own mission 
in life. The spirit and thought of these words underlie a large 
number of his utterances : 

" No man can be just to himself — can comprehend his own 
existence, can put forth all his powers with an heroic con- 
fidence, can deserve to be the guide and inspirer of other 
minds — till he has risen to communion with the Supreme 
Mind; till he feels his filial connection with the Universal 
Parent; till he regards himself as the recipient and minister 
of the Infinite Spirit ; till he feels his consecration to the ends 
which religion unfolds; till he rises above human opinion, 
and is moved by a higher impulse than fame." 1 

On Emerson's modesty again it is unnecessary to linger; 
the evidence and the witnesses agree in declaring that he was, 
what Matthew Arnold called him, the " most modest and least 
self-flattering of men." " Do not charge me with egotism and 
presumption," writes Emerson in his Journal (1837), "I see 
with awe the attributes of the farmers and villagers whom you 
despise." 2 He was the last man, too, to try to force his opinion 
on another. Yet he was the author of the essay on Self 
Reliance, the preacher of individualism, and often wrote in 
a style of Delphic finality, which, impersonal as it was, if we 
did not know the man outside his essays, might lead us to 
think that he was sublimely self-sufficient. " For no man," 
he once declared, " can write anything who does not think 
that what he writes is for the time the history of the world." 3 
It would be idle to contend that he who could enter the follow- 
ing in his Journal did not feel the importance — many will be 
inclined to say the exaggerated importance — of his mission 
to the world : " I have . . . slaves to free, . . . imprisoned 
spirits, imprisoned thoughts . . . which, important to the 
republic of man, have no watchman or lover or defender but 
I [sic] ;" 4 though on the other hand it should be remembered 

1 Ibid., 136 (ed. 1877). 

2 Emerson in Concord, 98. 

3 Works, iii, 181 ; see also Ibid., 180. 

4 Emerson in Concord, 78. 



135 

that Emerson had too keen a sense of humor to be uncon- 
scious of the misunderstanding and ridicule to which his own 
prophetic role must necessarily subject him: " Empedocles 
undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when he said, ' I am 
God ' ; but the moment it was out of his mouth it became a 
lie to the ear; and the world revenged itself for the seeming 
arrogance by the good story about his shoe. How can I hope 
for better hap in my attempts to enunciate spiritual facts ? M1 

Parker, though he was a veritable warrior in his aggressive- 
ness, unafraid of any opposition, " our Savonarola " as Emer- 
son called him, had a beautiful simplicity and humility of 
character which it would be hard to overstate. In the pulpit 
he could thunder against whole communities, but below the 
pulpit he could go away in tears when a single man called him 
" impious." Possibly in none of the transcendentalists was a 
more active self-confidence united with a truer simplicity and 
modesty. Yet even in Parker's case pride is surely not too 
strong a word to describe the spirit with which he stated and 
upheld his radical intellectual and religious views; and it is 
clear that his self-confidence too rested on a belief in the divine 
origin of his ideas. 

So far there can be only agreement; but when we come to 
the discussion of this element in Margaret Fuller and Alcott 
difference of opinion is sure to appear. 

Margaret Fuller has been considered by many not only one 
of the proudest, but one of the vainest women that ever lived. 
That her nature was proud, even haughty — if anyone had 
any motive for denying it — it would be useless to deny. 2 She 
had a queenliness of bearing amounting almost to imperious- 
ness. She seemed conscious of her intellectual superiority. 3 
There are in her own utterances on this subject such confusion 
and even absolute contradiction that one is led to suspect some 

1 Works , i, 190. 

2 Memoirs, i, 234, and ii, no; Higginson, 303. 

3 Yet her admission, already quoted, of inability to understand a popular 
work of Fichte is not indicative of the intellectual braggart; neither are her 
fears of incapacity on undertaking the biography of Goethe, nor the rever- 
ence with which she approached the Novum Organutn. 



136 

subtlety of character that has at first escaped him; for each 
of her apparently most egotistical remarks can be matched 
by one of well-nigh as striking and quite as sincere humility. 
Emerson is authority for the statement that Miss Fuller made 
this declaration, " I now know all the people worth knowing 
in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own." 1 
Place beside this interesting claim the following (1840), and 
which are we to believe ? — " . . . since I have had leisure to 
look at myself, I find that, so far from being an original genius, 
I have not yet learned to think to any depth, and that the 
utmost I have done in life has been to form my character to 
a certain consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell 
the truth with a little better grace than I did at first." 2 

The difficulty is partly, not wholly, cleared away when we 
remember that a distinct change is observable between the 
early and the late periods of Margaret Fuller's life. In a 
" credo " embodied in a letter written at nineteen she de- 
clares, " I believe in Eternal Progression. I believe in a 
God, a Beauty and Perfection to which I am to strive all 
my life for assimilation. From these two articles of belief, 
I draw the rules by which I strive to regulate my life." But 
in the same letter we find the avowal, " My pride is superior 
to any feelings I have yet experienced: my affection is strong 
admiration, not the necessity of giving or receiving assistance 
or sympathy." 3 Only a year or two later, on Thanksgiving 
Day, 1 83 1, Margaret Fuller had that experience (already re- 
ferred to) which seems to have been a critical hour in her 
spiritual development, and which, though giving utterance to 
an essentially unchanged belief, uttered it this time with 
humility rather than with pride. The whole account as given 
in the Memoirs should be read. 4 Suffice it here to say that for 
fear of displeasing her father she had attended church against 
her will. There the joyful nature of the services had jarred 
upon her own gloomy feelings, and wounded by what she 

1 Memoirs, i, 234. Emerson quotes this as a perfectly serious statement 
on Miss Fuller's part. 

2 Ibid., ii, 26. 

3 Ibid., i, 136. 

4 Ibid., 139. 



137 

believed to be the world's failure to recognize her worth, she 
walked alone far out over the fields, and, after a period of 
struggle and anguish, under the influence of nature fought her 
way back to serenity. " I saw there was no self ; that selfishness 
was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only 
because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only 
to live in the idea of the All, and all was mine. . . . My earthly 
pain at not being recognized never went deep after that hour. 
. . . Since that day, I have never more been completely en- 
gaged in self; but the statue has been emerging, though 
slowly, from the block. Others may not see the promise even 
of its pure symmetry, but I do, and am learning to be patient. 
I shall be all human yet ; and then the hour will come to leave 
humanity, and live always in the pure ray." 1 There is evi- 
dence that there is truth in these words, and the years of 
Margaret Fuller's life, as one follows another, show her in- 
creasing humility and humanity. She is always conscious, 
however, of the inherent pride of her nature, and over and over 
we find her striving to overcome it : " It is I, who by flattering 
myself and letting others flatter me that I must ever act nobly 
and nobler than others, have forgot that pure humility which is 
our only safeguard. I have let self-love, pride and distrust creep 
upon me and mingle with my life-blood." 2 " I am ' too fiery ' 
... I never promised any one patience or gentleness, for those 
beautiful traits are not natural to me ; but I would learn them. 
Can I not ? " 3 The change in her own nature which Margaret 
Fuller, by sheer power of will, effected, is the most admirable 
aspect of her life ; but even this can be looked on as only a 
partial explanation of the paradox of her pride and humility. 

Quotations showing these two qualities could be multiplied 
almost indefinitely, but the few already given are enough to 
show at least one thing, her astonishing frankness of utterance. 
Concerning the fundamental truthfulness of her nature all 
her biographers are agreed, but it remained for Mr. Higginson 
to point out that this in itself serves in large measure to ex- 

1 Ibid., 141 (from a journal). 

2 Love Letters of Margaret Fuller, letter xx (1845). 

3 Memoirs, ii, 96. 



138 

plain what was popularly considered her superlative vanity, 
that Margaret Fuller merely said about herself what other 
people often think of themselves but do not utter. Toward 
all things, herself included, she was the inexorable critic. 1 Of 
this element in her nature Horace Greeley is witness: 

" But, one characteristic of her writings I feel bound to 
commend, — their absolute truthfulness. 2 She never asked 
how this would sound, nor whether that would do, nor what 
would be the effect of saying anything ; but simply, ' Is it the 
truth ? Is it such as the public should know ? ' And if her 
judgment answered 'Yes/ she uttered it; no matter what 
turmoil it might excite, nor what odium it might draw down 
on her own head. Perfect conscientiousness was an unfail- 
ing characteristic of her literary efforts. Even the severest 
of her critiques, — that on Longfellow's Poems, — for which an 
impulse in personal pique has been alleged, I happen with cer- 
tainty to know had no such origin. When I first handed her 
the book to review, she excused herself, assigning the wide 
divergence of her views of poetry from those of the author 
and his school, as her reason. She thus induced me to attempt 
the task of reviewing it myself. ... At length I carried the 
book back to her in utter despair of ever finding an hour in 
which even to look through it; and, at my renewed and 
earnest request, she reluctantly undertook its discussion. The 
statement of these facts is but an act of justice to her 
memory." 3 

There can be no question that Margaret Fuller could at 
times use her tongue sharply and sarcastically, and one can 
suspect that her victims may have been doubly incensed be- 
cause her cutting sentences were keenly and truly critical. 
Doubtless it has been the handing down of anecdotes illus- 
trating this unhappy failing and the transmission of revenge- 
ful feelings in the form of unwarranted prejudice that has 
helped to create that considerably prevalent idea of Miss 
Fuller which seems to consist of a personification of this single 



1 Ibid., i, 128 and 295; ii, 210. 

2 See, on this point, Ibid., 7. 

3 Ibid. , 158. 



139 

trait. Anything more unjust cannot readily be imagined. 
Margaret Fuller had the unfortunate combination of a temper 
and a tendency to utter the truth. But she had not a particle 
of petty meanness in her nature. 

The qualities we have been discussing, together with her 
almost incredible lack of tact, do their full share in account- 
ing for the disagreeable first impression that we know Miss 
Fuller frequently made on people. This absence of tact 
amounted sometimes, in her own phrase, to " childish petu- 
lance and bluntness." Mr. Higginson relates a story 1 of 
how, at some social gathering in Cambridge, when the cake 
was passed she at first took a piece and then, suddenly re- 
placing it, remarked, " I fear there will not be enough to go 
round." And Horace Greeley's amusing account 2 of how he 
tried to offer her advice on the use of tea and coffee illustrates 
the same point. 

But now do these different elements which we have been 
considering, when combined in the proper proportions, offer 
a final explanation of the original problem? They can hardly 
be said to do so. Does not the following — Miss Fuller's con- 
versational brilliancy is well known — come nearer than any- 
thing hitherto quoted to showing the fundamental essence of 
her pride, at least as it appeared during the transcendental 
period ? — 

" There is a mortifying sense of having played the Mirabeau 
after a talk with a circle of intelligent persons. They come 
with a store of acquired knowledge and reflection, on the 
subject in debate, about which I may know little, and have 
reflected less ; yet by mere apprehensiveness and prompt in- 
tuition, I may appear their superior ... I should despise my- 
self, if I purposely appeared thus brilliant, but I am inspired 
as by a power higher than my own." 3 

This is the pride and confidence of the prophet, the true 
transcendental pride if there be any, quite identical with the 
Delphic self-assurance of Emerson's essays and the Orphic 

1 Higginson, 305. 

2 Memoirs, ii, 153. 
8 Ibid., 22. 



140 

Sayings of Alcott. Beyond dispute there is in it an element 
of the ridiculous ; beyond dispute it shows some lack of humor ; 
but it is vain to deny it also a certain grandeur. It is no 
mere posing ; it is sincere. So though we may smile we must 
also ask: Was not Margaret Fuller really more proud of her 
aspirations 1 than of herself, of the truth she felt speaking 
through her than of what she actually was? Even prophetic 
pride may be unlovely enough; but the point is that it is also 
quite above a crude egotism. It is apparent how easily this 
woman may have been misinterpreted. We must not mini- 
mize any of the unpleasing, overbearing qualities of her na- 
ture ; but it should be remarked in conclusion that, were there 
no other arguments to disprove it, the years of her married 
life, and, for a far longer period, the craving of her heart 
for human love, could leave against her no final charge of 
self-sufficiency. 

Of Alcott it is more difficult to speak. The facts seem clear, 
and yet one fears to do injustice to a man so possessed with 
the sense of his mission to the world. The other transcen- 
dentalists took themselves seriously, but none so seriously as 
Alcott. He lacked completely the sense of humor. 2 He had 
drunk deep of the cup of " unity," saw the salvation of the 
world only in his philosophy, and believed in the Platonic 
conversation as a method of disseminating it. Transcenden- 
tal and prophetic pride possessed him completely. Writes 
Emerson to Carlyle : 

" He is a great man and was made for what is greatest, 
but I now fear he has already touched what best he can, and 
through his more than prophet's egotism, and the absence of 
all useful reconciling talents, will bring nothing to pass, and 
be but a voice in the wilderness." 3 

Alcott writes thus in Concord Days: " May we not credit 
New England with giving the country these new Instrumen- 
talities for Progress, viz : — Greeley, the Newspaper ; Garrison, 

1 Ibid., i, 312. 

2 See Sanborn, 358, footnote, concerning the caricatures and parodies of 
the Dial. 

3 C arlyle-Emerson Correspondence , II, 14. 



141 

a free Platform; Phillips, a free Convention; Beecher, a free 
Pulpit; Emerson, the Lecture? The Conversation awaits 
being added to the list." 1 

Perhaps the reader is expected to associate no name with 
this last " instrumentality " ; but the association is inevitable, 
and it seems hard to acquit Alcott of the charge of vanity. 
In this connection the following complaint of Alcott to Emer- 
son is at once so startling and so illuminating that it leaves 
little to be said : " You write on the genius of Plato, of 
Pythagoras, of Jesus; why do you not write of me? " 2 Mere 
vanity was never responsible for that; for however much 
vanity we may be disposed to find in it, a more important 
ingredient was an extreme quality and an excessive quantity of 
transcendental pride. In a word Alcott was not free from 
what Mr. Higginson has well called " a certain high souled 
attitudinizing." The Concord School of Philosophy, which 
made him the American Plato and brought " plenty of talk 
to swim in," was the realization of a long-cherished hope. 
But it will be more charitable and probably at the same time 
more just to bear in mind what was observed in the case of 
Margaret Fuller, and when we are disposed to censure, to 
remember that Alcott was capable of writing such words as 
these : " Certainly men need teaching badly enough when 
any words of mine can help them. Yet I would fain believe 
that not I, but the Spirit, the Person, sometimes speaks to 
revive and spare." 3 

In all the transcendentalists, then, in varying degrees and 
kinds, we may observe a common transcendental pride, some- 
what of the function of the prophet. All had had what they 
deemed a spiritual revelation, and all felt called on to preach 
it to the world. Alcott and Emerson wrote very frequently 
in the omniscient style ; Margaret Fuller, and even Parker and 

1 Concord Days, 177. 

2 Sanborn, 543. Orestes A. Brownson is authority (to be accepted with 
hesitation perhaps under the circumstances) for the statement that Alcott 
" boasts of being to the nineteenth century what Jesus was to the first." 
Brownson's Works, iv, 420. 

3 Higginson and Boynton, A Reader's History of American Literature, 180. 



142 

Charming, were not free from a positiveness of utterance some- 
times approaching it; while Alcott and Miss Fuller employed 
it largely in their " conversations." They all showed, in 
widely different ways, somewhat of the feeling that through 
them an Absolute Truth greater than themselves was speak- 
ing. Now such a feeling when exposed to the world — even 
though unaccompanied, as here, with any attempt to force 
beliefs on others — was simply bound to call forth ridicule and 
bitter opposition. 

But we must analyze this matter a little further. It is clear 
that we are considering simply an aspect of the self-reliance 
and individualism of the transcendentalists, and a word should 
be said in this connection concerning the meaning of those 
phrases they so frequently employ — " rely on your instincts," 
" trust your intuitions." When Emerson, for instance, de- 
clares in the American Scholar, " If the single man plant him- 
self indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge 
world will come round to him " — why is not such a doctrine, 
it may be asked, the very height of lunacy, and the proposal 
of it as a moral precept the opening of the very floodgates of 
anarchy? Is this not indeed individualism run mad? Per- 
haps it is. But we should be careful to understand Emerson 
before we judge him; and many who have censured this part 
of his doctrine most severely, as we observed in our opening 
chapter, show they have taken him entirely amiss. They 
assume that he uses the word " instinct " in its ordinary sense. 
He uses it of course in no such way, but in a way which can 
be understood only in the light of his whole philosophy. Sup- 
pose he had said " conscience " instead of " instincts " (he 
would have meant nothing different in kind, only something 
less comprehensive in its application) — then the majority of 
mankind would have been willing to assent, for the majority 
of mankind believe — however they explain it — in the existence 
of some reality corresponding to the former word. But when 
Emerson goes further, and makes this inner sense not merely 
a guide to conduct, but a diviner of spiritual truth, then the 
great majority will not follow, then they say to him, " Your 
words are jargon to us ; you proclaim a thing that does not 



143 

enter our experience." And who can doubt that the great 
majority, so speaking, tell the truth? The question then for 
us is not so much, How far is Emerson's position true? as it 
is rather, How far by resting his beliefs upon an experience 
that most of mankind does not share, does he show himself 
thereby impractical? We know what his own answer to that 
question would have been. But meanwhile for the present we 
must leave the subject. 

IV 

One point remains for consideration in this chapter, the 
charge that the transcendentalists were blind to the facts of 
sin and evil in the world. A few quotations will make clear 
what their conceptions on these matters were. 

Of the origin of evil Channing says, " I cannot hope to 
explain what the greatest minds have left obscure. In truth, 
I do not desire to remove obscurity from Providence. . . . 
The darkness of God's providence is to me an expression of 
its vastness, its immeasurable grandeur. ... Of much that is 
evil in human life I see the cause and the cure. Many forms 
of human suffering I would not remove, if I could ; for I see 
that we owe to them all the interest and dignity of life. . . . 
I do not see how sin and suffering can be removed, but by 
striking out from our nature its chief glories." 1 In his ser- 
mon on The Evil of Sin, 2 where he considers the question from 
the moral rather than from the philosophical point of view, 
he exhibits no tendency to emphasize the negative nature of 
evil : " I wish to guard you against thinking lightly of sin. 
No folly is so monstrous." This sermon, however, is not one, 
in its subject, typical of Channing, and sin and evil in his 
preaching as a whole are conspicuous by their absence. 

Alcott's position is thus embodied: 

" ' Evil no nature hath : the loss of good 
Is that which gives Sin its livelihood.' 

" A check on itself, evil subserves the economies of good, as 
it were a condiment to give relish to good ; " etc. 3 

1 Channing, 455 ; see also 629. 

2 Works, iv, 151; see also v, 243. 

3 Table Talk, 167. See also Sanborn, 190, for a similar view written in 
his diary in 1835. 



144 

Margaret Fuller writes in her " Credo " : " Whatever has 
been permitted by the law of being must be for good, and only 
in time not good. We trust, and are led forward by experi- 
ence, . . . The moment we have broken through an obstruc- 
tion, not accidentally, but by the aid of faith, we begin to inter- 
pret the Universe, and to apprehend why evil is permitted. 
Evil is obstruction ; Good is accomplishment." 1 

And Emerson : " Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, 
not absolute : it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All 
evil is so much death or nonentity," etc. 2 

" Sin, seen from the thought, is diminution, or less; seen 
from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect 
names it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The con- 
science must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not; 
it has an objective existence, but no subjective." 3 

And finally Parker: "... in estimating the phenomena of 
evil, my own faith says there is a perfect system of optimism 
in the world ; that each man's life is to him an infinite good. 
Of course all his physical evils must be means of progress, all 
his errors likewise unavoidable steps in his course to happi- 
ness. But to legitimate this in the court of the understanding, 
where all other truths are legitimated, I find difficult." 4 

" I think sin makes little mark on the soul; for, i, much of 
it is to be referred to causes exterior even to the physical man ; 
and 2, much to the man's organization. I think 99/100 of 
sin are thus explicable — the result of the man's limitation — A, 
the result of his circumstances ; B, of his organization." 5 

In these brief quotations is exhibited on the whole remark- 
able unanimity — Channing, as usual, being less radical than 
the rest. Transcendentalism was a system of unflinching 
optimism. With this theory a tendency appears in the writ- 

1 Memoirs, ii, 289. 

2 Works, i, 123, Divinity School Address, 1838. 

3 Ibid., iii, 80. See also vi, 241 ; and Cabot, 354-6. Practically the whole 
of the essay on Compensation is a discussion of this theme. 

* Weiss, i, 148. 

5 Ibid., 149. See also Parker's sermons on the Economy of Pain and the 
Economy of Moral Error. 



145 

ings of these men — varying, however, in different cases very 
greatly — to minimize, to soften, or simply leave out of account 
the ugly facts of life. In Alcott and Emerson this was most 
marked. The question of a corresponding neglect in the lives 
of the transcendentalists is not one for the present portion of 
our study. 

And now, one by one, we have passed in review the counts 
of the indictment that began our chapter. And, after all, have 
not the discussions of these various topics been in reality — 
what we at first suggested that the different charges were 
themselves — but variations on a single theme? What, it is 
asked, has that theme been? It has been, we shall not say 
real mysticism, but surely something closely approaching it in 
nature. We have already emphasized the impossibility of 
separating the intellectual and emotional elements of transcen- 
dentalism, and this " something " akin to mysticism that has 
formed the essence of our chapter has ranged, in unbroken 
continuity, all the way from a genuine mysticism on the one 
hand to a fervidly felt and mystically related philosophy on 
the other. To see whether this suggested unity has any real 
existence, let us review briefly the topics we have taken up. 

First we discussed some of the humorous aspects of the 
movement. And among these, what one, by far, was the most 
striking? A fantastic and absurd use of figure and symbol- 
ism. But a mere glance at the works of the great mystics of 
the world (of Boehme, for instance, or of Swedenborg) is 
sufficient to show that something of this sort — not always in- 
deed so crude or so lacking in literary power — comes nearer 
perhaps than anything else to being the outward mark of mys- 
ticism, of the attempt of the seer to convey in words his " in- 
effable " experience. And what a remarkable confirmation of 
the contention is lent by the fact that in Alcott, the one unques- 
tioned mystic of the group, this symbolism is most prominent; 
that in Margaret Fuller and Emerson there is some of it, but 
less ; while in Channing and Parker there is none at all ! 

Mysticism itself we treated next, and here accordingly no 
comment is required. 
11 



U6 

Then we considered " transcendental pride " — and found 
each of these men assuming somewhat of the role of a prophet, 
speaking with somewhat of the finality of an oracle, exhibiting 
an unshakeable confidence in the veracity of his insights. 
Here — as we hinted before — do we not perceive a remarkable 
resemblance between the revelations of this prophetic spirit 
and the illuminating, " noetic " quality of mysticism ; and has 
not the assurance with which these intuitions are affirmed a 
manifest relation to the sense of authority which the visions 
of the mystic carry with them? Surely it is something more 
than a coincidence that the intensity with which this prophetic 
pride appears in each of these persons is almost exactly pro- 
portional to his mystical intensity. Alcott and Margaret 
Fuller, in both cases, head the list; Channing and Parker 1 are 
at the other end. But one point is worthy of emphasis. The 
transcendentalists were not content to keep their revelations to 
themselves ; they must publish and preach them from the house- 
tops ; and so, though their " pride " be in part the self-assur- 
ance of the mystic — already it is hinted — it may be something 
more. 

Finally what of the transcendental attitude toward sin and 
evil? Has that too a link with mysticism? It has, beyond a 
doubt; though here, conspicuously, it is difficult to estimate 
the relative parts played by emotion and intellect in determin- 
ing belief. An optimistic view of the universe, with a ten- 
dency to grant to evil only a relative or negative existence, is 
not an invariable, but it is a strikingly frequent attendant of 
the mystical nature, 2 and, it need hardly be added, of idealis- 
tic, transcendental philosophies. We have the union here of 
several forces, making together toward a single end. These 
men were in a way theologians, and, revolting from Calvinism 
with its intense and overwhelming conviction of the reality of 
sin, they went to the other extreme. They were philosophers 
seeking a principle of unity in the world, and finding it, as 

1 Parker of course exhibited one kind of pride intensely ; but we refer 
especially to this distinctly prophetic pride. 

3 ". . . the mystic range of consciousness . . . is on the whole pantheistic 
and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic." James, The Varieties 
of Religious Experience, 422. 



147 

they believed, in the ideal, they denied to the enemy of the 
ideal, essential existence. Lastly, they were men of mystical 
tendencies, and just as far as their emotional experiences lifted 
them out of the ordinary world, in so far the facts of that 
world became illusions and phenomena and their faith in an 
optimistic order was confirmed. 

Even this hurried summary is sufficient, we trust, to show 
that if we use the term mysticism somewhat elastically, we 
were right in saying that our chapter has had, essentially, one 
theme ; and as far as we have considered it, the popular charge 
against the transcendentalists might be said to simmer down, 
pretty largely, to this : that they were mystics. 

And how of this charge, of the question with which we 
began? The purpose of the chapter, as was said, has been 
more to understand than to pass judgment. Yet certain con- 
clusions perhaps suggest themselves. Just because our pres- 
ent position is tentative, however, is open to revision, let us 
put them not as conclusions at all, but mainly in the form of 
questions. 

If it be true, as it surely is, that the very essence of mys- 
ticism is an individual and largely incommunicable experience, 
and if it be true, as again it surely is, that the practical ele- 
ment in human nature always involves some social aspect of 
man's being, then is not the conclusion inevitable that the very 
essence of mysticism is something impractical, that it is its 
very nature to be out of touch with everyday life? Just as 
far, then, as these transcendentalists were real mystics, just as 
far as they dwelt in a realm of ineffable and incommunicable 
experience, were they not in a very real sense " beyond the 
clouds " ? Just as far as their philosophy — whether true or 
false is not the question — rested on an individual standard and 
they themselves relied on intuitions which humanity as a whole 
could neither appreciate nor share, were they not isolated from 
the world of common men and in so far unable to affect it? 
Just as far as the intensity of their individualism and the pride 
of their assurance repelled mankind — whether justly or not is 
not the question — did they not cut themselves off from effec- 
tive service? Just as far as their belief in the non-reality of 



148 

sin and evil — whether true or false, again, is not the question 
— led them to neglect or to gloss over the ugliness of the 
world, were they not guilty of " transcending common-sense ? " 
These, we think, are pertinent inquiries. And everyone of 
these men had in him something at least of the practical defi- 
ciencies at which they hint. The popular criticism of the 
transcendentalists has beyond doubt a basis in real fact. 

But all this is unsatisfactory and not final. The vital ques- 
tion has not yet been asked. That question is not, How far 
would it seem that these men must have been out of touch with 
practical life ? but rather, How far mere they out of touch with 
it? To attempt to answer this is our next task. But mean- 
while what we have already seen is fertile in perplexities. 
What is the meaning, we are constrained to ask, of these 
struggles of Channing and Margaret Fuller against the mys- 
ticism and over-emotionalism of their natures? And this is 
but one of the unanswered problems. We feel ourselves on 
the verge of a deep contradiction. There is suggested al- 
ready a paradox, the resolution of which (if such a thing be 
possible) will bring us nearer perhaps than anything else to 
the heart of what this curiously complex thing, New England 
transcendentalism, really was. 



CHAPTER IV 
The Transcendentalists and Practical Life, II 

I 

William Ellery Channing, we have seen, was by birth of 
an emotional and contemplative rather than of an active dis- 
position, exhibiting a marked inclination toward reverie and 
sentimentalism. But the passages quoted to illustrate these 
tendencies show not less strikingly another thing: that Chan- 
ning believed this proneness to excess of thought and feeling 
full of danger and that he struggled manfully to give these 
inner elements practical expression. And so successfully did 
he struggle that it would hardly be an exaggeration to affirm 
that he devoted his whole mature life, both in the large things 
and in the small, to the service of others. To justify such a 
statement his brother's tribute to his unselfishness, previously 
quoted, is in itself almost sufficient. This unselfishness and 
the desire to serve, help not a little in accounting for one of 
Channing's most conspicuous traits — conservatism. Conserva- 
tism is, on the whole, the characteristic that puts him in most 
marked contrast with the later transcendentalists, with such 
a man, for instance, as Theodore Parker. Yet conservatism 
in Channing, strangely enough, seems to illustrate exactly 
what radicalism is witness to in Theodore Parker — the funda- 
mentally utilitarian, philanthropic, practical spirit of the man. 
It was this element in the nature of the former that Hazlitt 
so keenly seized on : 

" We never saw anything more guarded in this respect than 
Dr. Channing's ' Tracts and Sermons ' — more completely sus- 
pended between heaven and earth. He keeps an eye on both 
worlds ; kisses hands to the reading public all round ; and does 
his best to stand well with different sects and parties. He 

149 



150 

is always in advance of the line, in an amiable and imposing 
attitude, but never far from succor." 1 

This is a distortion of the truth. The bare fact may be 
correct, but there is an unjustifiable insinuation of a deliber- 
ately politic motive. Channing desired to serve the world. 
While he seems to have acted under the conviction that ex- 
treme radicalism cannot accomplish the best practical results, 
there is no evidence that he ever consciously sacrificed truth 
to utility. 

His constantly increasing interest in the practical led him 
to write and speak very widely on varied topics of political and 
general public concern, and to have an active share in the 
agitation of social reforms 2 before the country. His part in 
the anti-slavery struggle, though his conservatism excited 
the animosity of the extreme abolitionists, was prominent and 
influential. To give details in this connection would be merely 
to summarize or repeat the chapters on that subject in his 
biographies or that on The Anti-Slavery Movement in Boston 
in Winsor's Memorial History. The mere enumeration of 
some of his acts in this agitation will accordingly be sufficient : 
his letter of protest against the anti-Garrison meeting in 1835, 
the publication of his Slavery in the same year, his open letter 
The Abolitionists to James G. Burney (1836), another open 
letter to Henry Clay on the Annexation of Texas, his promi- 
nent part in the demonstration after the murder of Lovejoy 
in 1837, and from this time till his death in 1842, various 
letters, essays, and addresses. Throughout, though he always 
displayed intellectual cautiousness and deliberation, there was 
never evidence of moral cowardice. The following from 
Samuel J. May, an abolitionist, and at one time among Chan- 
ning's severest critics, is sufficient testimony to the boldness 
and heroism of Channing's attitude : 

" We look back with no little admiration on one who, en- 
joying as he did, in the utmost serenity, the highest reputa- 
tion as a writer and as a divine, put at hazard the repose of 
the rest of his life, and sacrificed hundreds of the admirers 

1 Chadwick, 203. 

2 Chadwick, chapter ix. 



151 

of his genius, eloquence, and piety, by espousing the cause 
of the oppressed, which most of the eminent men of the land 
would not touch with one of their fingers." 1 

Channing's part in the anti-slavery cause is an illustration 
of only one of numerous similar interests in matters of public 
concern. Prison discipline, temperance, pauperism, child 
labor, the condition of the working classes, educational ques- 
tions 2 of a wide variety, these and many others received his 
attention and enlisted his sympathies, so that his name, not 
merely in this country but in Europe, came to be associated 
with many other than purely theological matters. 3 By not a 
few he was looked on as the apostle of freedom in the widest 
sense. The fact that Hazlitt and Brougham deemed him 
worthy of notice in the Edinburgh Review shows how much 
more than most Americans he had attracted attention abroad. 
In France, articles on Channing appeared in the Journal des 
Debats and many of his works were translated into French. 
Renan's essay on Channing in his Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse 
may be summed up in these words : " His theology . . . lays 
itself open to very easy attack; but his ethics may be praised 
without reserve." 4 Renan deprecated Channing's failure to 
adjust his theology to the most recent criticism, but he paid 
a high tribute to the worth and inspiring influence of his 
character. 

To repeat, then, Channing became a man of action in spite 
of, not because of, his native disposition. As Alcott wrote 
of him in his diary, " His heart has sympathized more deeply 
with his race than often happens to the philosophic genius." 5 
On the whole, especially when we bear in mind that he was a 
clergyman and hence quite properly interested first in religious 
matters, we may say that, so far from being out of relation to 

1 Chadwick, 276, note. 

2 Concerning his relations with Horace Mann, see Miss Peabody, Reminis- 
cences, chapter xxiv. 

8 On Channing's reputation abroad, see Life, Letters and Journals of 
George Ticknor, i, 479. 

4 " Sa theologie ... est tres-facilement attaquable ; quant a sa morale, on 
peut la louer sans reserve." 

5 Sanborn, 168. 



152 

the world of cold facts about him, he was conspicuous for 
the breadth and practical character of his interests. 

II 

Bronson Alcott's relation to the practical world may best 
be considered perhaps in connection with certain characteristic 
events of his life. 

For nearly fifteen years after his return from the South, 
Alcott devoted himself in the main to school-teaching. On 
the one hand his spirit was progressive and he made many 
admirable reforms, but on the other his theories were so 
radical as to arouse inevitable antagonism in the various com- 
munities where he taught and seriously to interfere with the 
practical success of his methods. What some of those methods 
were a glance at the last and most famous of his schools will 
show. This, the Temple School on Tremont street, Boston, 
opened most auspiciously, in September 1834, with thirty 
pupils. Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who later gave an account 
of this enterprise in her Record of a School, was Alcott's 
assistant; and Margaret Fuller too was connected with it for 
a time. 

Alcott's fundamental educational theory was Platonic — and 
he certainly exhibited an astonishing consistency in carrying 
into practice his most radical philosophical ideas. He be- 
lieved in the plenary inspiration of childhood. Emerson re- 
corded in his Journal (1838) Alcott's contention that "from 
a circle of twenty well-selected children he could draw in their 
conversation everything that is in Plato." 1 The function of 
the teacher, as he saw it, was merely to touch this potentiality 
into life, to preserve the child's native divinity by striving to 
keep off the weight of custom and the inevitable yoke. His 
school was indeed an attempt to realize in practice the thought 
of Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. 2 
The fact that Alcott put in print some of these conversations 
with his school-children is proof, doubtless, of his courage and 

1 Ibid., 185. 

2 He knew this ode well, and paraphrased it in his diary, 1834 (Ibid., 199), 
and elsewhere. 



153 

deep faith in his own theories; but it is not less an indication 
of deficient practical insight. These published conversations 
are, from certain points of view, highly interesting reading; 
but unfortunately some persons — wholly aside from any dis- 
belief in pre-existence — may be inclined to discover in the 
precocious answers of the pupils at least as much evidence 
that A. Bronson Alcott was their teacher as that they had 
spent their ante-terrestrial days in sporting upon the shore of 
the immortal sea. The utterances of young Josiah — already 
quoted — on clay and spirit and the death of babies, may pos- 
sibly be deemed sufficient warrant for this view. 

Miss Peabody, who was a transcendentalist herself, and in 
agreement with Alcott's theories in many respects, believed 
that he pushed them too far. Her criticism is doubly valu- 
able : " I think you are liable to injure the modesty and uncon- 
sciousness of good children by making them reflect too much 
on their actual superiority to others." And she adds, bring- 
ing out a trait of Alcott's character, " I do not suppose you 
will ever change your mind thro' the influence of another." 1 
Margaret Fuller criticized him adversely, also, putting in his 
mouth the ironical exclamation : " O for the safe and natural 
way of Intuition ! I cannot grope like a mole in the gloomy 
passages of experience." 2 

As time went on, various causes, mainly the opposition cre- 
ated by the publication of Conversations with Children on the 
Gospels, contributed to impair the prosperity of his school, 
and Alcott was plunged in financial embarrassments. He 
writes in his diary these revealing words : 

" I am involved in debt, arising from the unsuccessful issue 
of previous experiments in human culture. What I earn is 
all pledged by obligations to others, and I have already antici- 
pated the earnings of the next two or three years, even should 
I be successful. And so the claims of my family are to be 
set aside for the claims of others. . . . Yet will I go on ; great 
results are to spring from the little seed that I shall sow." 3 

1 Zbid., 1 88. 

2 Memoirs, i, 171. 

3 Sanborn, 205. 



154 

His school struggled on, and the incident which ultimately 
caused its closing is as significant, in a very different way, as 
the quotation just given. In 1838 he received a colored child 
into his school. The parents of his pupils, with one exception, 
protested, and when Alcott refused to dismiss the negro girl, 
withdrew their own children. It was about this time that 
Mrs. Alcott wrote in a letter : " You have seen how roughly 
they have handled my husband. He has been a quiet suf- 
ferer, but not the less a sufferer because quiet. He stands to 
it, through all, that this is not an ungrateful, cruel world. I 
rail ; he reasons, and consoles me as if I were the injured one. 
I do not know a more exemplary hero under trials than this 
same ' visionary.' He has more philosophy than half the per- 
sons who are afraid he is thinking too much." 1 

After the failure of his school, Alcott first ventured a trial 
of his scheme of public conversations. In these years, too, he 
showed an interest in many of the reform movements of the 
day, the temperance cause, woman's rights, the anti-slavery 
struggle. Though here again his part was mainly speculative, 
it was not wholly so. His connection with the famous Burns 
affair shows the moral and physical courage of which he was 
capable, and although this incident did not occur till some years 
later (1854), we may quote here a few sentences from Mr. 
Higginson's description. An attack on the court house, where 
Burns, the fugitive slave, was confined, had been repulsed, 
owing to the failure of the crowd to give assistance to the 
handful of abolitionists who led it. 

" Meanwhile the deputy marshals retreated to the stairway, 
over which we could see their pistols pointing, the whole hall 
between us and them being brightly lighted. . . . Then fol- 
lowed one of the most picturesque incidents of the whole 
affair. In the silent pause that ensued there came quietly forth 
from the crowd the well-known form of Mr. Amos Bronson 
Alcott, the Transcendental philosopher. Ascending the 
lighted steps alone, he said tranquilly, turning to me and point- 
ing forward, ' Why are we not within ? ' ' Because,' was the 
rather impatient answer, ' these people will not stand by us.' 

1 Ibid., 22,1. 



155 

He said not a word, but calmly walked up the steps — he and 
his familiar cane. He paused again at the top, the centre of all 
eyes, within and without ; a revolver sounded from within, but 
hit nobody ; and finding himself wholly unsupported, he turned 
and retreated, but without hastening a step. It seemed to me 
that, under the circumstances, neither Plato nor Pythagoras 
could have done the thing better ; and the whole scene brought 
vividly back the similar appearance of the Gray Champion in 
Hawthorne's tale." 1 

In 1840 the Alcotts moved to Concord. There were three 
daughters then and a fourth was born during this year. In 
Concord for a time Alcott made a brave effort to stick to farm 
work and support his family; but his interest in the thought- 
currents of the day was too strong, and he again began hold- 
ing conversations and giving lectures. His knowledge of re- 
form and reformers in England meanwhile was increasing, 
and through the efforts of Emerson he was enabled, sailing in 
1842, to spend most of a year in England. He came back 
enthusiastic with new schemes for the application of radical 
thought. During his stay in England he had met Carlyle, and 
the latter's description of him, though it has often been quoted, 
should be given again: 

" The good Alcott : with his long, lean face and figure, with 
his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes ; all bent on sav- 
ing the world by a return to acorns and the golden age ; he 
comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom 
nobody can even laugh at without loving ! " 2 

In 1843 Alcott and his family (though Mrs. Alcott's heart 
was not in the affair) moved out to a farm in the town of 
Harvard, Massachusetts, about twenty miles from Concord, 
where, with several " revolting friends," they instituted the 
small community known as Fruitlands. The nature of the 
experiment was thus proclaimed in the Dial by Alcott and his 
English friend Lane: 

" We have made an arrangement with the proprietor of an 

1 Cheerful Yesterdays, 157. Parker, too, had an active share in the Burns 
incident. See the account in Frothingham's Parker, 425. 

2 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, ii, 8. 



156 

estate of about a hundred acres, which liberates this tract from 
human ownership. . . . Here we prosecute our effort to ini- 
tiate a family in harmony with the primitive instincts in man. 
. . . The inner nature of every member of the family is at no 
time neglected. . . . Pledged to the spirit alone, the founders 
can anticipate no hasty or numerous accession to their 
numbers. " 1 

This last indicates wherein the Fruitlands differed from the 
Brook Farm experiment. It was individualistic, not collec- 
tivistic. It was therein far more truly transcendental. 

The community was strictly vegetarian ; even milk and eggs 
were tabooed. Water was the only beverage. The " aspir- 
ing " vegetables, those which grow into the air like the fruits, 
were allowed, but the baser ones, like potatoes and beets, 
which grow downward, were forbidden. When cold weather 
came, the experiment had proved itself, materially at least, a 
complete failure. This was too much for Alcott. He lost 
his accustomed serenity, turned his face to the wall, and giving 
way to grief, refused to be comforted. For a while he seemed 
to want only to die. But he had a brave wife, and eventually 
he was brought to his senses and made to accept his fate. 2 

After a short stay at Still River, the Alcotts returned to 
Concord. Here they struggled against poverty, and it would 
appear that Mrs. Alcott did as much as her husband (prob- 
ably more than he) toward supporting the family. A little 
money left her at the death of her father, together with five 
hundred dollars from Emerson, had enabled them to purchase 
a house, but there was not enough to supply their other wants, 
and when in 1848 they removed to Boston it was apparently 
mainly because Mrs. Alcott thereby found employment that 
contributed materially to the support of the family. She be- 
came a visitor among the poor for various benevolent societies 
and later she kept an intelligence office. Mrs. Alcott after- 
ward declared : " I have labored, hand and brain, for the sup- 
port of my family. The conditions of our life have been com- 

1 Dial, June, 1843. 

2 See, for a realistic account of this experiment, in the form of a story, 
Miss Alcott's Transcendental Wild Oats, included in her Silver Pitchers. 



157 

plicated, and difficult to understand ; but we have submitted to 
no mean subterfuge, no ignoble surrender." 1 

During this time, Alcott was holding conversations, and had 
considerable spiritual but little financial success. He tried his 
luck in the West. The following entry in Miss Alcott's diary 
gives us a living glimpse into the " pathetic family " — and it is 
worthy of remark that the events recorded occurred in the 
very year of the Burns affair : 

" 1854. — Pinckney Street. — I have neglected my journal for 
months, so must write it up. School for me month after 
month. Mother busy with boarders and sewing. Father 
doing as well as a philosopher can in a money-loving world. 
Anna at S. 

" I earned a good deal by sewing in the evening when my 
day's work was done. 

" In February Father came home. Paid his way, but no 
more. A dramatic scene when he arrived in the night. We 
were waked by hearing the bell. Mother flew down, crying 
' My husband ! ' We rushed after, and five white figures em- 
braced the half-frozen wanderer who came in hungry, tired, 
cold, and disappointed, but smiling bravely and as serene as 
ever. We fed and warmed and brooded over him, longing to 
ask if he had made any money ; but no one did till little May 
said, after he had told all the pleasant things, ' Well, did people 
pay you ? ' Then, with a queer look, he opened his pocket- 
book and showed one dollar, saying with a smile that made 
our eyes fill, ' Only that ! My overcoat was stolen, and I had 
to buy a shawl. Many promises were not kept, and travelling 
is costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall 
do better.' 

" I shall never forget how beautifully Mother answered him, 
though the dear, hopeful soul had built much on his success ; 
but with a beaming face she kissed him, saying, ' I call that 
doing very well. Since you are safely home, dear, we don't 
ask anything more.' 

" Anna and I choked down our tears, and took a little les- 
son in real love which we never forgot, nor the look that the 

1 Sanborn, 309. 



158 

tired man and the tender woman gave one another. It was 
half tragic and comic, for Father was very dirty and sleepy, 
and Mother in a big nightcap and funny old jacket." 1 

This is a typical picture of the struggle, which, we must 
believe, the Alcotts carried on against poverty, until eventually 
Louisa Alcott, gaining literary renown and at the same time 
fulfilling her youthful ambition to bring relief to her parents, 
freed them from financial embarrassment. Even Alcott's own 
increased material success in his later conversations must be 
attributed in good measure to his daughter's popularity. Over 
these later years of Alcott's life we need not linger — years 
that brought the Concord School of Philosophy and with it 
(to use Miss Alcott's words) "plenty of talk to swim in" 
and the realization of his long-cherished dream to see himself 
the American Plato surrounded by a group of admiring 
disciples. 

The simple fact of the case then is — Alcott could not sup- 
port his family. Others, indeed, supported him ; and we can- 
not help wondering what would have become of him without 
his staunch friend Emerson, or, still more, without his devoted 
and talented daughter and his heroic wife. At the very time 
when Alcott was entering in his Journal, " All day discussing 
the endless infinite themes," 2 Mrs. Alcott was doing the end- 
less finite chores. Long afterward when the venerable Dr. 
McCosh asked Louisa Alcott her definition of a philosopher, 
it was from her own experience that she spoke when she made 
the prompt reply : " My definition is of a man up in a bal- 
loon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which con- 
fine him to earth and trying to haul him down." 3 

Such was Alcott. It is plain that, unconscious as he may 
have been of it, he was selfish. Nor is it hard to see how it 
came about. He was — we may almost say — a man of one 
idea. He saw the unity, not the diversity, of the world; and 

1 Cheney, 69. 

2 Sanborn, 455. 

3 Cheney, 315. 



159 

his one idea both blinded 1 him to much of the life around him 
and exaggerated the sense of his own importance. He saw in 
it a universal cure for the sins and failures of mankind, and 
longing to give his whole time to this great theme, how could 
he do otherwise than chafe under the petty labor after bread? 
The diary of Miss Alcott, kept during the Fruitlands ex- 
periment (she was then ten years old), which reveals inci- 
dentally the pathetic self-consciousness that her father had 
engendered in her innocent mind, contains a phrase which one 
is tempted, perhaps maliciously, to turn against Alcott. Here 
is the entry : " Had good dreams, and woke now and then to 
think, and watch the moon. I had a pleasant time with my 
mind." 2 Is not this a description of what her father had too? 
Such a statement unqualified, to be sure, would be but a half 
truth, but it is nevertheless a fact that Alcott was too easily 
tempted to do just this — have a pleasant time with his mind. 
Thoreau recognized it when he wrote to Emerson (1847) : 
" Mr. Alcott seems to have sat down for the winter. He has 
got Plato and other books to read. ... If he would only stand 
upright and toe the line ! — though he were to put off several 
degrees of largeness, and put on a considerable degree of lit- 
tleness. After all, I think we must call him particularly your 
man." 3 And Emerson, whose praise of Alcott is unending, 4 
was not unaware of the same thing. He writes in 1842 : " It 
must be conceded that it is speculation which he loves, and not 
action. Therefore he dissatisfies everybody, and disgusts 
many. When the conversation is ended, all is over. He lives 

1 An anecdote, related by Emerson, shows how oblivious he was not 
merely to the common, but to the beautiful things about him : " One thing 
I used to tell him — that he had no senses. . . . We had a good proof of it 
this morning. He wanted to know why the boys waded into the water after 
pond lilies. ' Why, because they will sell for a cent apiece, and every man 
and child likes to carry one to church for a Cologne bottle.' ' What ? ' said 
he ; ' have they a perfume ? I did not know it.' " Sanborn, 425. 

2 Cheney, 40. 

3 Thoreau, Familiar Letters, 175. 

* For some of the remarkable tributes of Emerson to the genius of his 
friend, see Sanborn, 236, 238, 345, 425, 537; Carlyle-Emerson Correspon- 
dence, I, 122. 



160 

to-morrow as he lived to-day, for further discourse, — not to 
begin, as he seemed pledged to do, a new celestial life." 1 

But now, while we recognize that Alcott's one idea distorted 
his vision of the world and unfitted him for the practical duties 
of life, on the other hand let us admit that he had the heroism 
to sacrifice everything, including his own comfort, to that 
idea, to stand unflinchingly for principle. Said Henry Hedge, 
" On the whole Alcott stands in my recollection for the best 
representative I have known of the spiritual hero." 2 And 
Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller (1837), "He has more 
of the Godlike than any man I have ever seen, and his presence 
rebukes and threatens and raises. He is a teacher. ... I 
can never doubt him." 3 Much as we may censure it in our 
calmer moments, we cannot but admit a certain sublimity in 
the temperament which, for an ideal, indulges in a splendid 
disdain of facts. When Sheriff Staples arrested Alcott for 
not paying his taxes and Miss Helen Thoreau asked him what 
Alcott's idea was, he replied : " I vum, I believe it was nothing 
but principle, for I never heard a man talk honester." 4 Refer- 
ence has been made, too, to the part played by Alcott in the 
Burns affair. This, and his refusal to dismiss the colored 
child from his school when he must have known that his action 
meant its ultimate closing, are typical of his attitude toward 
any question involving the practical application of his phi- 
losophy. In judging Alcott, we must remember this heroic 
adherence to principle, this determination to live his beliefs at 
any cost; we must remember, too, his lack of the sense of 
humor and with it the depth and sincerity of his conviction 
of a prophetic mission to the world. On the other hand, what 
we have seen of his life has been ample to show that in his 
case at least the popular application of the term transcendental 
was far from unfounded. When Emerson called Alcott a 
" tedious archangel " he put a great deal of truth into two 
words. 

1 Sanborn, 250. 

2 Ibid., 540. 

3 Ibid., 566. 

4 New England Magazine, May 22, 1873. 



161 

III 

To devote extended space to a consideration of Theodore 
Parker's relation to the world of practical activity is hardly 
necessary. Indeed, as one turns from his biography one feels 
in a mood to ask — such was the literally prodigious amount 
of labor of the most exhausting, varied, unselfish, and produc- 
tive kind that he crowded into his prematurely ended life — 
whether a more active man ever lived. Though in his case, 
then, our question is answered at the outset, it will nevertheless 
be proper to collect some of the facts, not alone for the sake 
of uniformity with the other parts of the discussion, but in 
order to emphasize certain aspects of his character. 

If on the one hand Theodore Parker attained a life of more 
tangible and doubtless greater activity than Channing, it 
should be recognized on the other that he did not have the 
same natively contemplative disposition to struggle against. 
He was by birth active. How fundamental, both in his public 
and his private relations, the element of practical common- 
sense in his nature was, is attested by dozens of anecdotes and 
by passages from his letters and journals — a single example 
of which is the fact that his judgment on money matters was 
considered so good that his friends sought his advice concern- 
ing investments involving thousands of dollars. Even Par- 
ker's immense reading was done actively rather than medita- 
tively. He misconceived his own nature when he said, " I 
was meant for a philosopher, and the times call for a stump 
orator." 1 His mind was not primarily metaphysical in cast. 
He was not an original philosophic thinker. And yet his love 
of metaphysics was hardly surpassed by that of any other 
member of the transcendental group. His own account of his 
spiritual experiences, of which a short review has already been 
given, serves to show how deep was his interest in and how 
fundamental his reliance on thought of this kind, and his lec- 
ture on Transcendentalism is, if anything, an even better reve- 
lation of how much his intellectual convictions meant to his 
religion. " Love of philosophy," he writes in another place, 
"may be 'the last infirmity of noble minds' [sic], but I will 

1 Chadwick, 278. 
12 



162 

cling to it still. You ask me what effect my speculations have 
on my practice. You will acquit me of boasting when I say, 
the most delightful — better than I could hope. My preaching 
is weak enough, you know, but it is made ten times the more 
spiritual and strong by my views of nature, God, Christ, man 
and the Sacred Scriptures." 1 Such was the fascination for 
him of metaphysical thinking that Parker feared it might 
carry him too high and so impair his usefulness to his fellow 
men. " I begin to fear my sermons are too speculative. Is 
it so? I wish to stand on the earth, though I would look 
beyond the stars. I would live with men, but think with 
philosophers." 2 As mere symbols of the way in which his 
life embodied this double purpose it is instructive to place 
side by side two of his typical " plans of work " while in 
West Roxbury: 

" Things to be done this week. 

" i. Finish two sermons. 

" 2. De Wette. 

" 3. Jacobi. 

"4. Fichte (Ethik). 

" 5. Duty vs. Inclination. 

" 6. Commence the account of Moses. 

" 7. Begin the translation of Ammon's ' Fortbildung 
Christenthums.' " 

" Work to be done this week. 

" 1. Plant the other side of the brook. 

" 2. Sow the garden vegetables. 

" 3. Plough the new land. 

" 4. Plant the old alleys. 

" 5. Visit Mr. Keith and Chap in in evening. 

" 6. See about the Sunday school. 

" 7. Get the benches for the vestry. 

" 8. Ask Mr. Ellis to be superintendent." 3 
The discussion of Parker's reading has served to show his 
passion for facts. The degree in which he combined this with 

1 Weiss, i, no. 

2 Ibid., 115. 

3 Frothingham, 93. 



163 

a love of speculation is one of his remarkable characteristics. 
The outline of his voluminous projected work on the Develop- 
ment of Religion 1 is a good illustration of this union of inter- 
est. His heart was in the book, but when the imperative call 
of the anti-slavery cause came, his moral and practical nature 
ruled, and he relinquished his cherished plan. 

It was with this turning of his interest to the slavery ques- 
tion and especially with the arousing of all of the fires of his 
nature at the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law that the tre- 
mendous will-power and activity of Theodore Parker came 
into greatest prominence. The chapters on this subject in the 
biographies affirm the indomitable energy and personal hero- 
ism of the man. During the years of this controversy, an 
endless mass of correspondence, lectures, sermons, and ad- 
dresses was interspersed with deeds of daring moral and phys- 
ical courage. 2 

Parker was chairman of the Executive Committee of the 
Vigilance Committee, sheltered fugitive slaves in his own 
house and aided their escape in all ways possible, took a promi- 
nent part in the fugitive slave affairs in Boston, in Faneuil 
Hall called for open resistance on behalf of Anthony Burns, 
and was indicted in connection with this case together with 
Phillips and Higginson, but never brought to trial. Later he 
came into intimate relations with John Brown, was one of five 
members of a committee pledged to the support of his enter- 
prises, and contributed money of his own and raised funds 
from others for that purpose. The entries in his Journal show 
how much of his time was spent. For example (1852?) : 

" Feb. 21. — These are sad times to live in, but I should be 
sorry not to have lived in them. It will seem a little strange 
one or two hundred years hence, that a plain, humble scholar 
of Boston was continually interrupted in his studies, and could 
not write his book for stopping to look after fugitive slaves — 
his own parishioners! 

1 Weiss, ii, 50. 

2 The period referred to was, of course, after the crest of transcendental- 
ism, but the qualities then conspicuously revealed in Parker were his 
throughout his life. 



164 

" Feb. 22. — Washington's birthday ! Very busy with fugi- 
tive slave matters. 

" Feb. 24. — Not well. Writing report on fugitive slave 
petitions, etc. 

" Feb. 25. — At home — about anti-slavery business. P. M. 
at the State-house with Anti-Slavery Committee. Phillips, 
Sewall, and Ellis spoke. Vigilance committee sat at night. 

" Feb. 26. — Much time in fugitive slave matters." 1 

A week or two before Buchanan's election, speaking of buy- 
ing books he wrote, " Last year I bought $1,500 worth. This 
year I shall not order $200 worth. I may want the money 
for cannons [sic]" 2 

Not the least remarkable feature of his activity was that 
through all this period he continued to discharge his minis- 
terial duties, preaching the same transcendental theology. At 
the end of his life he made an enumeration under eight heads 
of some of the most important fields covered by his preaching. 
They emphasize the practical nature of the man. These are 
the subjects : intemperance ; the abnormal desire of accumu- 
lating property; public education; the condition of woman; 
current political questions of all sorts ; the evils of war ; slavery ; 
the errors of ecclesiastic theology. 

Some of Parker's remarks on literature and art throw much 
light on his common-sense character and show how his moral 
dominated and prejudiced his aesthetic nature. We feel con- 
stantly that his hatred of selfish things in men like Byron 3 and 
Goethe led him to underrate them as poets. As he read 
Goethe's life his sympathy was aroused for Frederika Brion; 
and so it is more than a coincidence that twice, just after men- 
tioning her, he proceeds to rate Voltaire above Goethe as a 
poet. No abstract affinity between his own and Goethe's 
transcendentalism can make Parker love him. He says, " He 
was a great Pagan. His aim was to educate Herr Goethe. 
He leads one to labor, but not for the highest, not by any 
means for others. His theory was selfish, and the Christian 

1 Weiss, ii, 105. 

2 Chadwick, 331. 

3 Frothingham, 37. 



165 

was not in him." 1 But still more illuminating is the following 
from a letter to George Ripley, dated Rome, October 29, 1859 : 
" I can't attend much to the fine arts, painting and sculpture, 
which require a man to be indoors. And, by the way, the fine 
arts do not interest me so much as the coarse arts which feed, 
clothe, house, and comfort a people. I should rather be such 
a great man as Franklin than a Michael Angelo ; nay, if I had 
a son, I should rather see him a great mechanic, who organized 
use, like the late George Stephenson in England, than a great 
painter like Rubens, who only copied beauty. In short, I take 
more interest in a cattle-show than in a picture-show, and feel 
more sympathy with the Pope's bull than his bullumi Men 
talk to me about the ' absence of art ' in America (you remem- 
ber the stuff which Margaret Fuller used to twaddle forth on 
that theme, and what transcendental nonsense got delivered 
from gawky girls and long-haired young men) ; I tell them we 
have cattle-shows, and mechanics' fairs, and ploughs and har- 
rows, and saw-mills ; sowing machines, and reaping machines ; 
thrashing machines, planing machines, etc." 2 Parker evi- 
dently appreciated the popular use of " transcendental." y 

His love of the simple and the concrete is another manifes- 
tation of the qualities we are emphasizing. He writes : " I 
have always preferred to use, when fit, the every-day words 3 
in which men think and talk, scold, make love, and pray, so 
that generous-hearted philosophy, clad in a common dress, 
might more easily become familiar to plain-clad men . . . for 
this I must not only plead the necessity of my nature, delight- 
ing in common things, trees, grass, oxen, and stars, moonlight 
on the water, the. falling rain, the ducks and hens at this mo- 
ment noisy under my window, the gambols and prattle of chil- 
dren, and the common work of blacksmiths, wheelwrights, 
painters, hucksters, and traders of all sorts; but I have also 
on my side the example of all the great masters of speech — 
save only the French . . . — of poets like Homer, Dante, 

1 Weiss, ii, 21. 

2 Ibid., 3 77- 

8 91 out of 100 of his words were Saxon. John White Chadwick, Library 
of the World's Best Literature, xix, 11,077. 



166 

Shakspere, Goethe, of Hebrew David, and of Roman Horace: 
of philosophers like Socrates and Locke; of preachers like 
Luther, Latimer, Barrow, Butler, and South." 1 

And in this same connection, a sentence or two from Emer- 
son's tribute to Parker must not be omitted : " Theodore Par- 
ker was our Savonarola, an excellent scholar, in frank and 
affectionate communication with the best minds of his day, yet 
the tribune of the people, and the stout Reformer to urge and 
defend every cause of humanity with and for the humblest of 
mankind. . . . What he said was mere fact, almost offended 
you, so bald and detached ; little cared he. He stood altogether 
for practical truth; and so to the last. He used every day 
and hour of his short life, and his character appeared in the 
last moments with the same firm control as in the midday of 
strength." 2 

Anything but a utilitarian in the technically ethical sense, 
Parker was to the core a utilitarian in the practical sense. These 
are the two cardinal facts about him. Frothingham empha- 
sizes one when he declares, " The thing of most moment to 
say of Parker is, that he was pre-eminently a man of uses," 3 
or when he closes his biography by calling him " the best 
working-plan of an American yet produced ; " C. A. Bartol 
emphasizes the other when he ventures the assertion that Par- 
ker had " a conscience since Luther unsurpassed." 4 

IV 

Emerson's three lectures, The Times, The Conservative, 
The Transcend entalist, delivered in Boston at the end of 1841 
and the beginning of 1842, are most illuminating documents, 
for the more often they are read the clearer it becomes that 
he has both stated and defined his position on exactly the 
question we are now considering. Especially is this true of 
The Transcend entalist. Through this paper runs a sharp line 
of distinction pointing out nearly if not exactly that same 

1 Weiss, ii, 505. 

2 Emerson's Works, x, 324. 

3 Frothingham, 578. 
*Ibid., 345. 



167 

double meaning of the word transcendental which has already 
been emphasized: that on the one hand it has reference to a 
certain philosophical way of looking at the world, while on the 
other it is descriptive of the character and actions of a class 
of ultra-radical persons who find themselves out of joint with 
the society in which they live. 

With philosophical transcendentalism Emerson seems to de- 
clare himself completely at one. " The first thing we have to 
say," he begins in The Transcendentalist, " respecting what are 
called new views here in New England, at the present time, 
is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast 
into the mould of these new times." And then, a few para- 
graphs further on, follows the definition of transcendental 
which we quoted in full at the beginning of our essay. 

Toward transcendentalists in the second sense of the adjec- 
tive transcendental, Emerson seems to assume a double atti- 
tude. The fact that he refers to them as " this class," " these 
persons," " these children," is only part of the evidence that 
he does not intend to identify himself with them. On the 
one hand, for their conduct considered in itself he has through- 
out an implied, if never an expressed, censure. Yet on the 
other hand he seems, as we should expect from his views on 
fate and individuality, to have not merely a sympathy but 
almost a justification for them, seeing in the pendulum swing 
of events, the historical value and necessity for their very 
extremes and eccentricities. A number of quotations will 
best present his positfon. 

" It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the closest ob- 
server, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw 
themselves from the common labors and competitions of the 
market and the caucus, and partake themselves to a certain 
solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit 
has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold them- 
selves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their facul- 
ties and the work offered them, . . . their solitary and fastidi- 
ous manners not only withdraw them from the conversation, 
but from the labors of the world; they are not good citizens, 
not good members of society ; unwillingly they bear their part 



168 

of the public and private burdens ; they do not willingly share 
in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the 
enterprises of education, of missions foreign or domestic, in 
the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. 
They do not even like to vote. The philanthropists inquire 
whether Trascendentalism does not mean sloth: they had as 
lief hear that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcenden- 
talist; for then he is paralysed and can never do anything 
for humanity." 

Then Emerson gives an amusing colloquy between these 
people and the world. The former begin by complaining to 
the latter: 

" ' We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and 
rust : but we do not like your work/ 

" ' Then/ says the world, ' show me your own/ 

" ' We have none/ 

" ' What will you do, then ? ' cries the world. 

" ' We will wait/ 

"'How long?' 

" ' Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work/ 

" ' But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless/ 

" ' Be it so : I can sit in a corner and perish (as you call it), 
but I will not move until I have the highest command. If no 
call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that 
the want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my 
abstinence/ " 

It would be superficial indeed to assert that Emerson was 
unconscious of the element of absurdity in such a position. 
" There is, no doubt," he says, " a great deal of well-founded 
objection to be spoken or felt against the sayings and doings 
of this class." Or again (to pass for a moment from the essay 
to his Journal) : " Buddhism, Transcendentalism, life delights 
in reducing ad absurdum. The child, the infant, is a transcen- 
dentalism and charms us all ; we try to be, and instantly run in 
debt, lie, steal, commit adultery, go mad, and die." 1 But he is 
far more disposed to commend than to censure (we return to 
the essay) : 

1 Cabot, 413. 



169 

" Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, 
and these must. The question, which a wise man and a stu- 
dent of modern history will ask, is, what that kind is? . . . 

" These persons are of unequal strength, and do not all 
prosper. They complain that everything around them must 
be denied; and if feeble, it takes all their strength to deny, 
before they can begin to lead their own life. . . . 

" These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There 
is no compliment, no smooth speech with them ; they pay you 
only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they as- 
pire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this 
watch tower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and 
without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and 
priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat 
clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to 
the race of man." 

Finally, the concluding paragraph of the lecture should be 
quoted, because here, everyone must feel, Emerson is speaking 
of himself, defining his relation to the age, and as it were, 
seeking to justify that element which Carlyle criticized. And 
this relation, it is significant to notice, is precisely the one 
which Matthew Arnold seized on in his characterization of 
Emerson. 

" Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, 
when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute, 
or a subscription of stock, for an improvement in dress, or 
in dentistry, for a new house or a larger business, for a 
political party, or the division of an estate, — will you not 
tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for 
thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon 
these improvements and mechanical inventions will be super- 
seded ; these modes of living lost out of memory ; these cities 
rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats of 
trade, or the geologic changes : — all gone, like the shells which 
sprinkle the sea-beach with a white colony to-day, forever 
renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which 
these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as 
by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they for- 



170 

bore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength to reorganize 
themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, 
perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, 
in fuller union with the surrounding system." 

Thus, though Emerson does not identify himself with 
" these children," and deprecates their excesses, he feels for 
their general spirit a deep sympathy and clearly considers his 
own mission and position to be much like theirs. Already in 
Nature he had written of idealism, " It is a watcher more 
than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better 
watch." 1 And again, a little later, " I see action to be good, 
when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epami- 
nondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat 
still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine." 2 

In these quotations we have been listening, to be sure, 
merely to Emerson's theoretical views about practical life. 
But it would have been wrong to omit them, for they certainly 
throw much light on the more important question to which we 
now come: How did Emerson himself live? 

A not unprevalent conception of the man is that he was 
entirely out of touch with the everyday life of the world, and 
so a sort of living refutation of the value of his own idealism ; 
while on the other hand a widely adopted view makes him 
out the embodiment in one person of the Plato and the Yankee, 
a man uniting the ability to inhabit the high heaven of specu- 
lative thought, with the plain, practical common-sense of the 
typical New Englander. 

Emerson, like Channing, was of a natively contemplative 
disposition. His love of meditation, of solitude, was always 
strong, and at least at one time (which Mr. Cabot calls his 
"Transcendental apogee"), it seems that he carried this ten- 
dency to inaction and reflection to an extreme. It was then 
that he made that entry in his Journal which we have already 
quoted, 3 telling of " gray clouds, short days, moonless nights, 
a drowsy sense of being dragged easily somewhere by that 

1 Works, i, 64. 

2 Ibid., ii, 153. 

3 P. 127. 



171 

locomotive Destiny, which, never seen, we yet know must be 
hitched on to the cars wherein we sit." While this on the one 
hand appears to have been an exceptional condition, there 
seems to be no evidence on the other that Emerson ever con- 
sciously tried to avert these periods of dreamy contemplation. 

Perhaps the most illuminating source-book concerning the 
every-day life of Emerson is the Emerson in Concord of his 
son, E. W. Emerson. This, by means of many anecdotes, 
personal remembrances of the author, and extracts from 
Emerson's Journal gives us a vivid picture of the more inti- 
mate and domestic aspects of the man. Here we see, as well 
as Emerson the poet and philosopher, Emerson in the home 
and in the garden, Emerson on the stage-coach and the rail- 
road, Emerson in contact with his neighbors, fighting brush- 
fires with his townsmen, or conversing with fishermen and 
woodchoppers whom he met on his long walks. The reading 
of this book will tend to corroborate neither of the extreme 
views above mentioned. 

Whatever his nature might have made him had be been 
brought up under other circumstances, to say that Emerson 
actually was a practical Yankee, is, it decidedly seems, stretch- 
ing either the fact, or the meaning of the word. The often- 
quoted remark of his little son Waldo on seeing his father 
at work with a spade in the garden, " Papa, I am afraid you'll 
dig your leg," would in itself perhaps be sufficient to dis- 
prove Emerson's title to the name Yankee, without adding 
his own proud declaration that he could split a shingle four 
ways with a single nail. He disclaimed it himself again 
when he said, " God has given me the seeing eye, but not 
the working hand." 1 The author of Emerson in Concord, too, 
is at pains to point out the mistake in that view of his father 
which emphasizes his Yankee shrewdness : 

" The whole tale of the shrewdness has been told when it 
has been said that he was usually right in his instincts of the 
character of the persons with whom he dealt (though often 
he imputed more virtue than was rightly there), and that he 
avoided being harnessed into enterprises not rightly his, 

1 Holmes, 365. 



172 

lived simply, served himself and went without things which 
he could not afford, only however, to give freely for what 
public or private end seemed desirable or commanding on 
another or better day. These simple rules were his utmost 
skill. He had no business faculty or even ordinary skill in 
figures ; could only with the greatest difficulty be made to 
understand an account, and his dealings with the American 
publishers on behalf of Mr. Carlyle, adduced in proof of 
his Yankee ' faculty,' really only shows what love and loyalty 
he bore his friend, that he would freely undertake for him 
duties so uncongenial and, — but for outside help and expert 
counsel, — almost impossible for him." 1 

And this too is of interest : " Mr. Emerson cheerfully as- 
sumed such duties as the town put upon him. Almost im- 
mediately on his coming to Concord he was chosen a member 
of the School Committee, and later he served on it for many 
years. He never felt that he had the smallest executive 
ability, and on the village committee, as later on the Board of 
Overseers of the University, he preserved an unduly modest 
attitude, seldom speaking, but admiring the working and 
reasoning of others." 2 About the same is said of his conduct 
in the town meetings. 3 

Emerson was one of the earliest of the transcendentalists 
actively to express sympathy with the anti-slavery movement. 
As early as May 29, 1831, he permitted an abolitionist to 
lecture in his pulpit. Though Emerson was too disposed to 
look at the question historically and judicially to be fully at 
one with the most radical opponents of slavery, 4 his opposi- 
tion to that institution, while never actively aggressive, was 
always firm and sometimes even heroic. In 1835, when 
Harriet Martineau was nearly mobbed in Boston, he gave her 
shelter in his home; and shortly after the murder of Love joy 
in 1837, Emerson in his lecture on Heroism ventured to de- 
fend him, saying, "It is but the other day that the brave 

1 Emerson in Concord, 198. 

8 Ibid., 142. 

3 Ibid., 72. 

* See Holmes, 211. 



173 

Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob for the rights 
of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not 
to live." " A cold shudder ran through the audience at the 
calm braving of public opinion, says an eye-witness." 1 In 
1844 at the seizure of colored citizens of Massachusetts from 
vessels lying in Southern ports, he made a stirring address 
demanding their immediate release. In 185 1 he publicly re- 
buked Webster, in the face of hisses and groans, for his 7th 
of March speech. He entertained John Brown at his own 
home, 2 contributed to the Kansas cause, and later, when 
Brown was under sentence of death, declared that if he should 
suffer he would " make the gallows glorious like a cross." 
Previous to this he had delivered an address in New York 
on the Fugitive Slave Law and one in Concord after the 
assault on Sumner. In January, 1861, at the invitation of 
Wendell Phillips, he faced a stormy crowd in Music Hall, 
but was unable to make himself heard. 

Though this record (which by no means includes all that 
he did) is far from betokening apathy toward the slavery 
question, yet it cannot be called one of marked activity. He 
did not so consider it himself. The following from his 
Journal in 1852 shows exactly his position and his reasons 
for it: 

" I waked last night and bemoaned myself because I had 
not thrown myself into this deplorable question of Slavery, 
which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured voices. 
But then in hours of sanity I recover myself, and say, God 
must govern his own world, and knows his way out of this 
pit without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard 
it but me. I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, 
to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in 
the brain of man, — far retired in the heaven of invention, and 
which, important to the republic of man, have no watchman 
or lover or defender but I [sic]."* 

He expresses this same attitude at the beginning of his 

1 Emerson in Concord, 85. 

2 Ibid., 87. 
Ubid. } 78. 



174 

Fugitive Slave address 1 in New York, saying that he has his 
own spirits in prison and that he hopes he knows his own 
place. 

Even this brief glance at Emerson's connection with the 
anti-slavery cause is sufficient to put one fact — a most im- 
portant one for our discussion — wholly beyond dispute: 
that he possessed high moral courage and an unbending, Puri- 
tanical 2 adherence to principle. Indeed his sermon on the 
Lord's Supper, and his Divinity School Address, in point of 
opposing public opinion, required no small amount of these 
same qualities. 

As we read Emerson chronologically, there is observable a 
decrease in the purely speculative and an increase in love of 
anecdote and fact. 3 His interest in such men of action as 
Napoleon is significant. He apparently never cared for techni- 
cal metaphysics at any time. " Who has not looked into a 
metaphysical book? And what sensible man ever looked 
twice?" 4 Such a passage as the following (written late in 
life) may be directed merely at system-makers, but perhaps 
it would not be fanciful to read into it also a slight confession 
that he had himself indulged too liberally in speculation : 

" I confess to a little distrust of that completeness of system 
which metaphysicians are apt to affect. ... I share the be- 
lief that the natural direction of the intellectual powers is 
from within outward, and that just in proportion to the 
activity of thoughts on the study of outward objects, as archi- 
tecture, or farming, or natural history, ships, animals, chem- 
istry, — in that proportion the faculties of the mind had a 

1 Works, xi, 205. 

2 It is worthy of remark that even in some cases where it might hardly 
have been expected (as in his views on the observance of the Sabbath, 
card-playing, dancing, the theatre, etc.) Emerson held to the old and 
strict New England customs. See Emerson in Concord, 168 and 171 ; 
Works, Centenary Edition, iv, 345 and 357 ; and the conclusion of the essay 
on Shakespeare. 

3 Volume xi, Miscellanies, of his works exhibits him especially in the more 
practical aspect. 

4 Works, Centenary Edition, ii, 438. 



175 

healthy growth; but a study in the opposite direction had a 
damaging effect on the mind. 

" Metaphysic is dangerous as a single pursuit. We should 
feel more confidence in the same results from the mouth of a 
man of the world. The inward analysis must be corrected by 
rough experience. Metaphysics must be perpetually reinforced 
by life." 1 

Emerson had then by nature — do not the facts point strongly 
toward this conclusion? — a respect and love for the simple, 
plain, concrete things of life, and his speculative and con- 
templative studies, his idealism, never tended to breed in him 
disdain for anything of this sort. On the other hand, his 
life, mainly one of meditation, reading, writing, and lecturing, 
did (as he himself fully recognized) isolate him from and 
make him ignorant of many things of everyday concern. 
Tried by any such standard of activity as that which Theodore 
Parker set, Emerson's life was inactive and out of relation 
to the practical. Active and practical of its own kind, exert- 
ing an influence not easily overrated, it surely was neither 
active nor practical in the sense of touching the world at 
many points or in a large variety of ways. Emerson has 
himself well summed up his relation to the so-called concrete 
affairs of life at the begining of his essay on Prudence. These 
are his words : 

" What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have 
little, and that of the negative sort? My prudence consists 
in avoiding and going without, not in the inventing of means 
and methods, not in adroit steering, nor in gentle repairing. 
I have no skill to make money spend well, no genius in my 
economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers that I must 
have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate lubricity 
and people without perception. Then I have the same title 
to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holi- 
ness. We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as 
from experience. We paint these qualities which we do not 
possess." 

1 Works, xii, n. See also on this subject Ibid., viii, 39; x. 289; xii, 6 
and 44. 



176 

Or again this whole matter might be put in terms of the 
well-known " Hitch your wagon to a star." Emerson was an 
authority on stars, not on wagons. He felt it peculiarly 
his to put the whole emphasis on the star, but though his 
knowledge of wagons was deficient he does not appear ever 
to have said or done anything to show that he questioned 
their usefulness and necessity. If this be so, we perceive then, 
do we not, that a just estimate of Emerson's personality must 
lie between the extremes already mentioned? The opinion 
that Emerson lived his whole life " beyond the clouds " is 
clearly inadequate, and takes its rise usually, we must believe, 
from the critic's dislike of speculative writing. On the other 
hand, the view that would make him out a union of the Plato 
and the Yankee is again an obvious overstatement. Yet this 
estimate is surely nearer to the truth than is the other — for, 
in spite of its exaggeration, it indicates one of the deepest 
things about Emerson, a doubleness, we might almost say a 
contradiction, in his nature. He was the saint and seer; but 
he was not less — just the plain citizen of Concord. And 
there is a profound sense in which he did have the power to 
be at once " standing on earth " and " rapt above the pole." 

V 

The treatment of Margaret Fuller's relation to the practical 
may be considerably abbreviated owing to the fact that Mr. 
Higginson, in his admirable Life, has given especial attention 
to this aspect of her character with a view to readjusting the 
estimate of her earlier biographers. It would be superfluous 
to repeat in detail the evidence which he has accumulated. 
This evidence is scattered through the whole book, though it 
is the chapter on Miss Fuller's personal traits in which par- 
ticular attention is given to this subject. Mr. Higginson has 
pointed out that the authors of the Memoirs saw Margaret 
Fuller almost exclusively on her intense, aspiring side, and 
hence inevitably — and so quite pardonably — put undue empha- 
sis on this aspect of her nature; he has given proof for his 
statement that " there never was a year of Margaret Fuller's 
life, after her precocious maturity, when the greater part of 



177 

it was not given to daily, practical, commonsense labor, and 
this usually for other people." 1 

The treatment of her conversations and more especially of 
her emotionalism and mysticism has already sufficiently em- 
phasized her ethereal elements. There is no doubt that at 
times she could soar very high. Yet she always asserted that 
her philosophy was based in experience and that she preferred 
action to speculation. " That is the real life which is subor- 
dinated to, not merged in, the ideal." 2 There is a surprising 
analogy between Theodore Parker's statement that he would 
rather be a Franklin than a Michael Angelo and Margaret 
Fuller's declaration, " Yet would I rather, were the choice 
tendered to me, draw the lot of Pericles than that of Anaxa- 
goras." 3 She criticized Alcott and his children's school 
severely, because he rejected experience and longed for " the 
safe and natural way of intuition." A few sentences, too, 
may be quoted from a letter (1838) to show the sort of advice 
she was capable of giving a young friend : 

" I think the course of reading you have fallen upon, of 
late, will be better for you than such books as you formerly 
read, addressed rather to the taste and imagination than the 
judgment. The love of beauty has rather an undue develop- 
ment in your mind. See now what it is, and what it has been. 
Leave for a time the Ideal, and return to the Real. 

" I should think two or three hours a day would be quite 
enough, at present, for you to give to books. Now learn buy- 
ing and selling, keeping the house, directing the servants ; all 
that will bring you worlds of wisdom if you keep it subordi- 
nate to the one grand aim of perfecting the whole being. 
And let your self-respect forbid you to do imperfectly any- 
thing that you do at all. 

" I always feel ashamed when I write with this air of wis- 
dom ; but you will see, by my hints, what I mean."* 

To this may be added the statement that Miss Fuller's book 

1 Higginson, 304. 

2 Memoirs, ii, 30. 
8 Higginson, 310. 

4 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 346. 
13 



178 

Womaot in the Nineteenth Century (preface dated November, 
1844), an expansion of an article published the previous year 
in the Dial, gives the reader no impression of being the work 
of a visionary or of one unacquainted with life as it is ; on the 
contrary it rings with reality. 

But there is more substantial evidence on this point than 
the mere expression of her desires, her condemnation of the 
purely theoretical, or even her books, and letters of practical 
advice. The giving up at the death of her father (1835) of 
her long planned trip to Europe, 1 her struggle for the educa- 
tion of her brothers and sisters, 2 her exactness and care . in 
money matters, 3 her capacity in domestic affairs — these are 
but a few of the things that might be mentioned to show that 
she was no mere dreamer, that she was not ignorant nor 
neglectful of the practical issues of life. To this element in 
her nature her brother has borne witness. In his editor's 
preface to Woman in the Nineteenth Century, he writes at 
some length and with feeling — not of her intellectual bril- 
liancy, but of what his sister did. He speaks of himself as 
" one who knew her from childhood up — at home, where best 
the heart and soul can be known, — in the unrestrained hours 
of domestic life, — in various scenes, and not for a few days, 
nor under any peculiar circumstances," as one therefore " who 
speaks what ' he doth know, and testifieth what he hath seen/ " 
And then he goes on to tell of the " life of constant self-sacri- 
fice," the " devotion to the welfare of kindred and the race " 
of one who carried her " Christianity into all the departments 
of action, so far as human infirmity allows." An extract from 
a letter to her mother (1837) * s a remarkable revelation of 
this devotion. 4 

Put such a tribute as this one of her brother side by side 
with some of those passages quoted in the last chapter con- 
cerning Miss Fuller's haughtiness and mysticism. What light 
they throw on one another! Now may be more fully appre- 

1 Memoirs, i, 158. 

2 Ibid., 157. 

3 Higginson, 55. 

4 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 344. 



179 

ciated what before was hardly open to doubt: that the story 
of Margaret Fuller's pride and sentimentalism is at the same 
time the story of a rebellion against that pride and of a strug- 
gle against that sentimentalism. This struggle, as in the case 
of Channing's conflict with his feelings, was a successful one. 
She did not alter her temperament; but she did more and 
more gain control over herself; she did work a transforming 
change in her own character. Especially in the years begin- 
ning with her removal to New York — and afterward of course 
in Italy — when she seems to have come to the full maturity of 
her nature, does the practical side of the woman come clearly 
into evidence. She took an active, personal interest in nearly 
all philanthropic movements for social reform, 1 coming into 
immediate and vital contact with the convicts, paupers, out- 
cast women, etc., in whom she was so deeply interested. 
These were some of the subjects on which she wrote her 
articles for the Tribune: The Rich Man, The Poor Man, 
Woman in Poverty, What Fits a Man to Be a Voter? The 
Condition of the Blind, Prison Discipline, Appeal for an 
Asylum for Discharged Female Convicts, Politeness to the 
Poor, Capital Punishment. 2 " I doubt," Horace Greeley de- 
clares, " that our various benevolent and reformatory associa- 
tions had ever before, or have ever since received such wise, 
discriminating commendation to the favor of the rich, as they 
did from her pen during her connection with the ' Tribune.' " 3 
Her personal contributions, Mr. Greeley says, were " large in 
proportion to her slender means." 

Though these years in New York came after the crest of 
the transcendental movement, they came immediately after the 
period of the Conversations and the Dial. With a full recog- 
nition of the changes that Miss Fuller's character underwent 
in the course of her life, it must be said that there is no evi- 
dence of any transforming development of her nature within 
a few months such as might superficially be deemed necessary 
to account for the sudden alteration in the quality of her 

1 For her attitude on the slavery question, see Higginson, 122. 
2 Ibid., 213. 
3 Ibid., 214. 



180 

activity. The difficulty lies too deep for any such easy-going 
explanation. If there be a paradox here, we shall come 
nearer its resolution by considering to what an unusual de- 
gree she united apparently contradictory elements. That 
Margaret Fuller should have combined in one nature her in- 
tense emotional capacities, her critical and intellectual power, 
and her practical common-sense, is sufficient to prove the com- 
plexity of her temperament, and to warn those to look again 
who think they have understood her at a glance. 

What was the relation of the transcendentalists to practical 
life? This is the question to which, through two chapters, we 
have been seeking an answer, and yet now, as we approach 
the end of our discussion, a general conclusion seems, in many 
ways, impossible. The differences among these men appear 
more prominent perhaps than do their likenesses. Whatever 
fundamental identity of spirit they had, Theodore Parker and 
Bronson Alcott, in their attitude toward the concrete facts of 
life, stand strikingly, not seldom diametrically, opposed. Be- 
tween these extremes the others are arranged, and scarcely 
any general statement can be framed, however guarded in 
expression, to which one name at least will not be an exception. 

Indeed, as we glance back at the course of our investigation, 
does it not appear to have involved a hopeless contradiction? 
Do not its two parts — the previous chapter, we mean, and 
this — stand out, on the whole, in most conspicuous contrast? 
Do they not clearly reveal the paradox to which we earlier 
referred? We think they do. Yet it is in this very seeming 
paradox that the essence of transcendentalism — unless we are 
in error — must finally be sought. It is this which, in spite of 
all their differences, unites these men in a singular kinship 
and stamps them as the product of one set of forces. Let us 
make sure that we see what the nature of this contradiction is. 

In the earlier half of the discussion we saw a power at work 
whose tendency seemed to be, on the whole, to carry those it 
touched " beyond the clouds," away from the world of ordi- 
nary fact and common-sense. Variously as this force affected 
the different transcendentalists, not one of them entirelv 



181 

escaped it. An impatience with detail, a turning of the eyes 
from the ugliness of the world, a lack of accurate scholarship, 
a proneness to generalize on insufficient data — even these 
things were sufficient to reveal its presence ; while sometimes 
it amounted to an actual disdain of facts, to a retreat into the 
recesses of a purely personal experience, or, at last, to a soar- 
ing away on the wings of mystical rapture. The philosophy 
of these men, too — however vital some of its conceptions — 
must be pronounced one-sided. It showed an inclination, some- 
times a hopeless inclination, to overemphasize the spiritual and 
subjective, to perceive the unity while passing lightly over the 
diversity of life, to forget the " wagon " while gazing at the 
" star." The transcendentalists were idealists — but their 
idealism had not the great objective basis of reality of that of 
the Dantes and Goethes of the world. They were individual- 
ists — but their individualism, whatever its merits, tended only 
too often to carry with it a blindness to the significance of 
social and collective forces, to the part that institutions must 
play in human progress. There was a time, the years just 
before and just after 1840, when this interest in the purely 
intuitional and ideal ran highest. Then aspirations, often- 
times, came dangerously near being prized for their own sakes ; 
then the self-consciousness that characterized the whole period 
was most pronounced. The movement in its prime, 1 even 
among its leaders, showed marks of exaggeration, extrava- 
gance, and excess. A religion tending to sweep its disciples 
up into the thin atmosphere of rapture and speculation — some- 
thing of this sort, the facts being permitted to speak for them- 
selves, it was the main trend of Chapter III. to find in trans- 
cendentalism. 

But all this it has, hardly less, been the main trend of the 
present chapter to deny. The moment we are confronted with 
the plain facts of their lives, we realize that these men were 
far enough from inhabiting a purely isolated and ideal realm, 

1 It may be said that transcendentalism was what we speak of as " the 
movement in its prime," that after the crest of the wave had passed the very 
thing we are discussing ceased to be. One may so use the word if one 
chooses, but so to limit the term appears to the writer highly unphilo- 
sophical. See the closing paragraph of Chapter I. 



182 

that there was something in them to balance — partly at least — 
the tendency that drove them upward. They did not show, in 
their actual living, indifference to that evil whose reality they 
philosophically denied. They did not rest content with their 
creed, independent of its influence upon others, or unmindful 
of its dangers to themselves. In a score of ways — but pre- 
eminently in the slavery agitation — they came into vital con- 
tact with the great practical issues of the day. Not that the 
later facts of our study add nothing to our perception of the 
ethereal elements of transcendentalism. The contrary is true 
— especially of Alcott; he alone, 1 of the five we have consid- 
ered, seems open more than once to the charge of being pal- 
pably out of joint with common-sense. But the substance of 
the chapter goes to prove that these men were not dead to the 
real life around them, that they were not blind to facts, that 
transcendentalism touched and affected the great human world, 
and that to describe it as merely " flighty " and " ideal " is 
hopelessly inadequate. 

Here then — put in two paragraphs — we have the contra- 
diction. 

In none of the other transcendentalists do these opposing 
elements appear in such striking contrast as in Margaret 
Fuller. In her — the extreme case — is brought out with espe- 
cial clearness what was true, in its degree, of all the rest. Her 
later biographer, emphasizing the more practical side of the 
woman, has readjusted the estimate of the earlier historians 
of her life. He is right. Yet their account was not false ; 
it was merely incomplete; it gave but one side of her double 
nature. There were two Margaret Fullers : one, the intense, 
the imperious, the rapturous Margaret Fuller; the other, the 
Margaret Fuller who recognized the pride and hyper-emotion- 
alism of her nature and struggled to subdue them. There 
were two Channings : the youthful one of vague and sentimen- 
tal visions, the later one of wide and varied life; yet the ma- 
turer Channing was, after all, only the earlier one transformed. 

1 The criticism, therefore, which from his life, or the lives of lesser men, 
has generalized concerning the whole transcendental group, has not unnatur- 
ally done very large injustice. 



183 

There were two Emersons : the one — a halo round his head — 
delivering in the omniscient style his ultimate oracles ; the 
other a plain, kindly New England gentleman ready to turn 
humorously aside any suggestion of his own omniscience. 
There were even two Parkers and two Alcotts — though here 
the opponent forces were matched less equally. The practical 
Parker has made his presence amply felt; yet Parker had his 
transcendental flights. With the mystical Alcott we are well 
acquainted ; yet the man who saw the world as one vast spinal 
column stood, at another hour, ready to defend with his life 
his anti-slavery convictions. 

Transcendentalism then — is not this the logical conclusion? 
— was in no small measure the union of two contrasting ele- 
ments, the product of two opposing forces. The essence of 
the one was in the main impractical ; that of the other chiefly 
practical. The popular charge stands neither refuted nor 
confirmed. 

With these statements the chapter may best be brought to 
a close ; to attempt to analyze and interpret them belongs to 
the last division of the essay. But meanwhile one fact, re- 
peatedly brought out in the course of the discussion, must here 
be emphasized. About it there could have been indeed no 
initial disagreement; yet, for the purposes of our study, it is 
of unsurpassed importance. And that fact is this : that on 
the whole the most conspicuous similarity of these transcen- 
dentalists was simply their Puritan character. We have just 
been insisting on the differences between Bronson Alcott and 
Theodore Parker. Great as these were, the man who, it was 
declared, had " a conscience since Luther unsurpassed " and 
the man who stood in the mind of his friend as the best type 
of a spiritual hero he had ever known, are, after all, examples 
of the same New England character. They and the other 
chief transcendentalists had the same moral courage, the same 
adherence to principle, the same purity, nobility, elevation of 
spirit that belonged to the best of the old New England. The 
significance of this must already be apparent. 



CHAPTER V 
Conclusion 

We saw at the beginning of our study how, on the surface 
of the negative and critical age of reason, there slowly devel- 
oped a great tidal wave of change, which, invading almost 
every sphere of action and affecting life in a wide variety of 
ways, swept over Europe at the end of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth century. In politics and religion, 
in philosophy and literature — to mention no other departments 
of activity — revolts were instituted against prevailing stand- 
ards. 

To produce the conviction that transcendentalism was, if a 
late, still an organic part of this great revolution, there is 
needed no minute study of historical influences. But when 
we realize that the forces which led up to the New England 
outburst were the same as those whose interplay preceded the 
earlier and more widespread European commotion, we per- 
ceive how far beyond the power of the most elaborate study 
it must be to distinguish absolutely between the American and 
the foreign streams of tendency making toward the transcen- 
dental movement, to tell just how far the one development 
produced the other, how far the two were merely parallel. 
The old New England — and with it the ancestors of the trans- 
cendentalists — was interested predominantly in matters of re- 
ligion. Hence it was natural that new ideas, whether widely 
accepted or not, should early make themselves felt within this 
sphere of life. This was the actual case ; and, as we saw in 
the first chapter of our study, the story of the long preparation 
of the soil which alone made possible the later flourishing of 
transcendental views becomes, in no small measure, the history 
of the revolt from Calvinism and the rise of Unitarianism. 
When, then, with the culmination of Unitarianism in trans- 
cendentalism, a spirit emerges resembling the spirit which 
came with the culmination of the age of reason in the French 

184 



185 

Revolution, we are at a loss to tell just how far French Revo- 
lutionary influences have really been at work, and how far we 
have a case of similar causes producing similar effects. 

But, whatever the relative significance of the foreign and 
domestic contributions may have been, the fact itself remains 
the same, the fact, namely, that the spirit of New England 
transcendentalism and the spirit of the French Revolution are, 
in many respects, astoundingly alike. From the moment when 
Emerson — to go no farther back — freeing himself from the 
shackles of the church and calling on his countrymen to cast 
aside tradition and live their own lives, wrote the opening sen- 
tences of Nature, transcendentalism was linked forever with 
that world-movement which began conspicuously with Rous- 
seau. " Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains " — 
those words never cease to echo through the utterances of 
Emerson and Parker, of Alcott and Thoreau. Away with 
tradition! — Back to Nature! — Down with creeds and institu- 
tions! — The Golden Age is before us! — these were the battle 
cries which, born long before in France, reawakened now in 
New England, and the transcendental spirit partook to an 
extraordinary degree of that distrust of the past, that optim- 
istic faith in the future, that confidence in the efficacy of a 
formula for solving the problems of mankind, which inspired 
the most sanguine minds of 1789. To the truth of that other 
mighty ideal of the revolutionary age — that ideal to which, as 
embodied in the British Constitution, Burke bowed down, and 
to which he has given, perhaps, the loftiest expression — the 
transcendentalists were blind, almost as blind as the French 
Revolutionists themselves. They, like the latter, did not grasp 
the significance of historical continuity and evolution — seem- 
ing indeed, at times, without the slightest feeling for chron- 
ology; they did not reverence the authority of experience, nor 
perceive the complete dependence with which the present rests 
upon the past; they failed to comprehend the real functions 
of the church and state, and, exalting the individual, ignored 
in large degree the social and institutional factors of life. In- 
deed, the resemblance between the two movements is frequently 
so close that we are tempted to end the whole matter with the 



186 

dictum: Transcendentalism was the French Revolution of 
American religion ! Yet the moment we utter such a formula 
we are constrained to take three-quarters of it back, so vitally 
different, after all, the two revolutions really were; and the 
more we reflect the more we feel that this French Revolution- 
ary spirit is rather the indispensable emotional atmosphere in 
which transcendentalism was to be engendered than the real 
essence of the movement itself, or, to put it in a slightly dif- 
ferent way, that these partly separate and partly blended 
streams of American and European tendency, of which we 
have just been speaking, are not so much an immediate as an 
indirect contribution to that movement. 

But there was also a direct European contribution of prime 
importance. What this was, our discussion of the reading 
and studies of these men has, we trust, made clear. As we 
have already pointed out, with the passing of the age of reason 
a widespread desire arose in Europe for some new standard of 
truth, for some avenue broader than that of the pure intellect 
through which to approach the deepest problems of the world. 
As one response to this desire, there emerged both in England 
and on the continent, but preeminently in Germany, a general 
theory of the world and attitude toward life, which, in spite 
of the various modifications or even disguises it is capable of 
assuming, never completely loses its identity and in the end is 
always recognizable. The view itself — though there be no 
single satisfactory name for it — is world old. We may call it 
Platonism or Neo-Platonism, Idealism or Transcendentalism, 
or a dozen other names (even Pantheism, if we dare be so 
reckless as to employ that hopelessly indefinite term) ; and 
yet, widely or even diametrically as philosophies that we so 
designate may differ in even important respects, they retain a 
still more radical and essential kinship. During the years fol- 
lowing the French Revolution, this general view of the world, 
in various forms, gained widespread currency, appearing not 
merely in philosophers like Fichte and Schelling, but in poets 1 
like Goethe, Wordsworth, and Shelley. 

1 Platonism, it is perhaps superfluous to note, is a highly imaginative 
system ; Plato the most poetic of" philosophers. His philosophy has always 



187 

While the reason already assigned for the prevalence, dur~ 
ing these years, of this philosophy is, we imagine, fairly funda- 
mental, it must not be thought that it is offered as in itself a 
sufficient explanation. 1 The immense growth and influence 
of modern science was another potent and closely kindred 
cause of its appearance (" closely kindred," we observe, be- 
cause the scientific movement, with its emphasis on the in- 
ductive method, seems, at just this historical moment, to 
harmonize marvelously with the general revolt against the 
deductive method of pure reason). At the beginning of the 
nineteenth century the full daylight of the scientific age was 
dawning over Europe. But Europe was not willing to aban- 
don her religion. The reconciliation of science and religion, 
in other words, was one of the great questions of the time. 
Now Platonism offers — whether adequate or not — a solu- 
tion of this problem. Indeed Plato may be said to have 
erected his philosophy to solve it. Brought up in the doc- 
trine of Heraclitus, he sought amid the endless flux of things 
(iravra pel) on which that doctrine puts such emphasis, some- 
thing eternal and unchangeable — but something eternal and 
unchangeable was just what revolutionary Europe now, centu- 
ries after Plato's death, was seeking. And so there came to 
life in this later age a philosophy which in many ways resem- 
bled that of the Academy. 

Now of all the elements of change that were comprehended 
in the spirit of the time, it was, along with the prevailing 
enthusiasm, just this metaphysical attitude which appealed 
most to a little group of men and women in New England— 
the transcendentalists to be — and had the strongest influence 

appealed most strongly to men of the imaginative cast, and has been re- 
vived most successfully at times when men's emotions have run high. (The 
period of Elizabeth is only one example.) Such a poetical and imaginative 
age the one we are now considering preeminently was. 

1 To the question why this metaphysical view appeared so conspicuously 
at this time, the history of philosophy (in tracing the development of 
thought since Locke) has ready its own answer. But doubtless the history 
of philosophy — if by that we mean the history of metaphysical thought — is 
in itself inadequate to offer a full explanation, for such an explanation can 
hardly be less complex than the very life of the period itself. 



188 

upon them. Not only openly, in technical form, did this phi- 
losophy make its way, but much more often under some other 
name, some theological, perhaps, or literary guise. And pre- 
cisely because this view of the world was not in its essential 
nature new, other sources were" soon contributing their share, 
and influences were soon coming over the ocean of time as 
well as over the Atlantic. Ancient India and Persia, Greece 
and the Middle Ages, and many other times and countries, 
sent their portion. The springs of influence were world-wide, 
and they helped to awaken in their turn in New England a 
cosmopolitan spirit. 1 

But now, when these influences thus made their way across 
the water, by whom were they welcomed? On what did the 
seal of this new thought and spirit make its impress? Was 
there, like the European, no direct American contribution to 
transcendentalism? Were its indigenous elements merely 
those indirect and preparatory ones already traced in the story 
of Unitarianism ? Far from it. The fact of paramount im- 
portance is that these influences came to a group of men who 
were embodiments in its noblest form of the old New England 
character. They were Puritans to the core. This — and in 
making the statement it is not forgotten that England was 
the home of Puritanism — zms the signally American contri- 
bution to transcendentalism. The latter portion of our study 
has perhaps made this sufficiently apparent, but the signifi- 
cance of the fact is such that we must again dwell for a 
moment on what was said at the end of the last chapter. 

We have ample evidence of the stuff of which these leading 
transcendentalists were made. Though they had revolted 
against their ancestral creed, they had kept in its purity their 
ancestral character. Channing risking a life-long popularity 
and endangering many a life-long friendship by his stand on 
the slavery question; Alcott choosing to abide by his prin- 
ciples, and, at the price of its disbanding, to retain a colored 

1 Transcendentalists of course could claim no monopoly of the cosmo- 
politan spirit, especially in literature. The work that Ticknor and Long- 
fellow did, and later Lowell, must not be forgotten. It is worthy of remark 
that the cosmopolitan spirit brought forth not an imitative, but an American 
literature. The same spirit wrought a corresponding result in Germany. 



189 

child in the school ; Emerson sacrificing his position in the 
ministry to his convictions on the question of the Lord's 
Supper — these are but typical instances of this survival from 
the ancient stock of a stern, unbending, uncompromising vir- 
tue. These men had in common the sincerity, the purity, 
the moral heroism, the noble and unselfish adherence to an 
ideal, which we always think of as the dominant grandeur of 
the old Puritanism. 

Whatever else, then, and however much more transcenden- 
talism may have been, it was, as embodied in its leaders, the 
mingling of an old world and a new world element, the blend- 
ing of an idealistic, Platonistic metaphysics and the Puritan 
spirit, the fusion — at a high, revolutionary temperature — of a 
philosophy and a character. The white heat of feeling brought 
out the noblest outlines of that character and touched into 
actuality the potential mysticism which that philosophy a 
hundred times has shown itself to hold. 

In spite of not a few points of signal congeniality between 
Platonism 1 and Puritanism, such a fusion, considered merely 
theoretically, promises at the outset some remarkable features. 
Idealistic philosophies are not as a rule lacking in insistence 
on the importance of the moral element of life ; and so also 
on the other hand are the Puritans in one sense, the moral 
sense, already idealists. They too in a way look upon earthly 
existence as a dream and shadow. But the old New Eng- 
enders united with their moral idealism no inconsiderable 
measure of practical common-sense. The Puritan is emi- 
nently a doer ; he is, in spite of his laying up for himself 
treasures in heaven, in close contact with concrete things. 
Metaphysical idealism, on the other hand, carries with it, as 
many examples — Hamlet among the rest — abundantly prove, 
a marked tendency toward the purely theoretical, toward con- 
templation, inaction, isolation from the concrete and practical ; 
while these qualities are only accentuated if it become trans - 

1 For the sake of convenience, since we must have some single name for 
this metaphysical attitude, we shall call it v Platonism," using the term, we 
would have it understood, very broadly and elastically, and waiving entirely 
the question whether Plato himself was a mystic or a rationalist. 



190 

fused with mysticism. Puritan and Platonist! — whatever re- 
semblances of temper they may have, it is not unfair to say, 
nevertheless, that they present in considerable measure the 
antithesis of doer and thinker, of action and contemplation, 
of the practical and the theoretical, of the Occidental and the 
Oriental. And the union of the two! — is not such a coming 
together of " mighty opposites " (regardless of the environ- 
ment in which it happens) bound in itself to generate intense 
emotion? What, then, is to be anticipated when that union 
takes place in an atmosphere of revolution? 

But now in these two opposing elements are we not face 
to face again with precisely the contrast, the paradox, the 
contradiction concerning which the facts of our study have 
already forced us to say so much? Here on the one hand we 
have the celestial vapor with which the transcendental balloon 
was inflated, on the other the ballast that tended to keep that 
balloon from voyaging beyond the terrestrial atmosphere. 

The moment we take this " fusion " point of view, how 
naturally explicable become the differences of prevalent 
opinion as to the relation of the transcendentalists to the con- 
crete, daily world; and how justifiable the conclusion which 
the facts thrust upon us, that no generalization can be made 
on this point except one that halts between the extreme views. 
These men were metaphysical idealists — with mystical pro- 
clivities — and as a group, they show some of the extrava- 
gances and even absurdities into which that type of thinking 
— and of feeling — exhibits a tendency at times to pass. The 
Hamlet paradox emerges more than once. But the fact is 
that these men were at bottom, all the while, utilitarians, utili- 
tarians not in the technically ethical but in the practical sense. 
The English foundation of their natures was not lost, even 
though something highly alien to the Anglo-Saxon genius 
had come down upon it. 

Some of the very instances that seem most to prove their 
impracticality and that have aroused the satire of the scoffers 
most, are, if we look closely, examples of this utilitarian, not 
exclusively theoretical tendency beneath. Alcott attempting 
to put his doctrine of pre-existence and Wordsworth's Ode 



191 

into practice in his school ; Alcott planting Fruitlahds ; even 
Alcott consuming " aspiring " vegetables, are cases of this 
sort. In all we feel the practical jslement struggling for ex- 
pression. Emerson had hold of this fact when he wrote, " My 
quarrel with poets is that they do not believe their own poetry. 
But Alcott is a poet, the only one in the country ; he believes 
his images." Nothing could better prove that the spirit of 
this is true than the way in which Alcott's theoretical optimism 
had its counterpart in his practical serenity even in adversity 
of the soul-trying kind. 

But it is just as well not to go to extreme examples. The 
great lasting proof of this " union " of which we are speak- 
ing is the persistency with which the transcendentalists carried 
over their philosophy into the sphere of practical religion. 
They were not proverbial metaphysicians, content in isolation 
from real life to spin the theory for the theory's sake; nor 
mystics, content to inhabit a purely subjective realm of ecstacy, 
oblivious to the world. They were not even primarily teachers. 
They were preachers. They must put their philosophy into 
practice ; they must feel it ; they must live it ; they must spread 
it abroad by establishing schools, by holding conversations, by 
lecturing, by writing essays, by preaching. The Puritan blood 
was still within their veins. 1 Transcendentalism was a gospel. 

They were not content to affirm abstractly the divinity of 
human nature; they must apply this belief in their stand on 
the slavery question. They were not content to rest in a 
theoretical individualism; they must preach and live lives of 
conspicuous self-reliance. And it was the union of the icono- 
clasm of the Puritan character and a philosophy that taught 
no adherence to " external " authority, even more, probably, 
than its French Revolutionary roots, that made New England 
transcendentalism a grand casting off of tradition. And so 
we might continue. In this union of a philosophy and a 
character we find a rational justification of a large number of 

1 The attitude of most of the transcendentalists toward Byron and Goethe 
has been brought out and is an example of surviving Puritanism ; " the Puri- 
tan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he" writes Emerson 
of Goethe to Carlyle. 



192 

the facts we have already observed. Even " transcendental 
pride " may be included here. Platonism grafted on Puritan- 
ism gives in an intensified form a certain intellectual positive- 
ness — not wholly alien to either of those spirits — which, if 
almost wholly free from the narrow intolerance of the latter, 
is quite one with it in the moral certainty of the everlasting 
truth of its own convictions. If " transcendental pride " be 
on the one hand the inspired self-assurance of the mystic, 
what is it on the other but the Puritan character in a new 
guise ? 

Excellently as all these things are illustrated by the careers 
and characters of those whom we have considered, not one of 
them — not even Margaret Fuller herself — affords so nearly 
perfect an example of our thesis as does a man concerning 
whom, owing to the limited method of our treatment, we 
have had but little to remark — Henry David Thoreau. It will 
hardly be in the nature of a digression, therefore, to pause 
for a moment to notice in what an eminent degree he united 
the practical and the mystical, the revolutionary and the 
common-sense. 

Thoreau, it should be said to begin with, in spite of the 
fact that he cared for the metaphysical even less than Emerson, 
was a true transcendentalist in his view of life, and after his 
own kind, too, a philosopher. He was, in the next place, the 
extreme individualist, probably, of the whole group, applying 
his principles almost to the point of anarchy. But his anarchy, 
we should hasten to add, was of a harmless variety. On one 
occasion, as is well known, he refused to pay his taxes and 
was sent to jail; but when some friend discharged the in- 
debtedness and set him free, he contented himself with being 
" as mad as the devil," and went back to picking huckleberries 
in the pastures where " the State was nowhere to be seen " — ■ 
a course of action which proves not so much that Thoreau 
lacked consistency and courage as that he possessed at least 
a fair endowment of common-sense. This element of common- 
sense, his practical ingenuity and mechanical skill, his moral 
intensity and determination to live his theories, exemplify 
one aspect of the man, the New England qualities of his 



193 

character; but quite another aspect is illustrated by his love 
of solitude, of communing with nature, or of dreaming away 
long hours in rapt contemplation, totally oblivious to the ex- 
ternal world. Thoreau it is — not Emerson — who is the true 
Yankee-mystic. The Walden experiment is symbolical of 
this, and so too in another way are his writings, full of 
minute observation and detail, but permeated nevertheless with 
the transcendental spirit. The realistic strain in his works is 
pronounced, and in this respect at least he has a far closer 
kinship with the very greatest writers than Emerson can claim. 
Whether the belief which a few bold critics have advanced 
that Thoreau's writings will ultimately outrank Emerson's 
is at all tenable, is a question of no importance for the pur- 
poses of our present study, but surely the strongest argument 
for one who might wish to defend such a proposition would 
be precisely this fact that the balance between the real and the 
ideal is much better maintained by Thoreau than by Emerson. 1 
Indeed, in nearly every respect, the " poet-naturalist " em- 
bodies almost equally those contrasted elements whose blend- 
ing, in one proportion or another, we have noticed in all these 
transcendentalists. 

Emerson himself showed that he was conscious of this 
composition of old world and new world forces and really 
recognized the main point on which we are insisting, when 
he said : " there is an ethical element in the mind of our 
people that will never let them long rest without finding exer- 
cise for the deeper thoughts. It very soon found both Words- 
worth and Carlyle insufficient." 2 One of the most convinc- 
ing proofs of the truth of Emerson's remark is simply the 
political importance of transcendentalism, its relation to the 
slavery agitation. One is probably not likely to overrate the 
influence exerted on the North by the conception — even in its 
abstract form — of the dignity of human nature. Toward 
spreading this conception the transcendentalists did much. 
Nor does all the credit for applying the theory to the facts 

1 In connection with all this it is at least interesting to remember that 
Thoreau had both Scotch and French blood in his veins. 

2 Works, Centenary Edition, xii, 472. 

14 



194 

belong to others. They too perceived the connection and 
carried their thinking into practice. 

Indeed it is utterly impossible to draw any distinct line be- 
tween the transcendentalists and the abolitionists — as, to be 
sure, it is equally impossible to distinguish clearly the boundary 
between transcendentalism and most of the radical movements 
of the day. The Garrison movement, the literary movement 
which began with Ticknor and was continued by Longfellow 
and Lowell, the Brook Farm movement, these and many others 
— even some of the absurd religious extravagances in the less 
cultured portion of the community — were all reflections of 
the larger spirit of the time, all aspects of a single tendency, 
and all idealistic in the sense of seeking a more nearly perfect 
condition of society and humanity. 

These considerations ought, we think, to render clearer than 
it could be made at the beginning of our study, the relation 
between Brook Farm and transcendentalism. We do not wish 
to minimize the reality of that relation. The sources of the 
two movements were in many respects identical, as the name 
of George Ripley itself is sufficient to show; 1 and doubtless 
too the Brook Farmers got most of their ideal enthusiasm from 
the transcendentalists. The aims of the two movements, like- 
wise, were in a large sense the same, the moral perfection of 
man and society. But while the transcendentalists sought that 
moral perfection almost exclusively through the individual 
and predominantly by means of a philosophical-mystical re- 
ligion, the Brook Farmers sought it only partly through the 
individual and very exceptionally or incidentally through any- 
thing philosophical. In one sense then Brook Farm was an 
organic part of transcendentalism; 2 in another sense it seems 

It has been declared that Ripley owed his first idea of Brook Farm to a 
suggestion from Dr. Channing. 

2 Brook Farm was surely an embodiment of the tendency (of which we 
have had so much to say) to apply the theoretical, though the theoretical is 
not in this case the philosophical. It conformed, too, with the nature of 
transcendentalism in its Puritanism, an aspect of the experiment which has 
often been remarked. It is interesting again to remember the practical way 
in which many of the Brook Farmers — Ripley and Dana, for instance — went 
to work after leaving West Roxbury. 



195 

like a side-issue of the movement, deviating from the main 
line of its development; in still another sense — and we trust 
this will not be deemed, in the light of the prevalent con- 
ception, impertinently paradoxical — it was most truly a part 
of transcendentalism in that it was a reaction against it, for 
it embodied the inevitable return of the pendulum which any 
extreme manifestation of individualism must ultimately pro- 
duce. Certainly as far as the leading transcendentalists are 
concerned, the realm of their activity overlaps that of aboli- 
tionism 1 much more extensively than it overlaps Brook Farm. 
What we have just been saying should make it sufficiently 
clear that our description of transcendentalism as a mingling 
— in the heat of a revolutionary age — of an idealistic philos- 
ophy and the Puritan character is not offered as a complete 
formula for its composition. In proof — if any proof be needed 
— that the blending of these elements is not in itself enough 
to account for the results, it is necessary only to point to 
Jonathan Edwards. In him too we have a union of Puritan 
character and an idealistic philosophy; and, though he lived 
in the age of prose and reason, it may be said that, on a 
necessarily limited scale, he created an environment of en- 
thusiasm. Edwards and his philosophy present many strik- 
ing analogies — and how beautifully ironical it all is! — to the 
transcendentalists and their philosophy. Yet he was hardly 
a transcendentalist himself; and so he both confirms our an- 
alysis, and at the same time guards us against its too narrow 
application. Not every New England Puritan who read Cole- 
ridge and Carlyle became a transcendentalist. It was only in 
especially prepared minds 2 that the new philosophy found con- 
genial soil, in minds possessing among other things, perhaps, 
an inborn mystical capacity. So if transcendentalism was the 
union of a character and a philosophy, it was such a union 

1 See Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 129. 

2 As to how far Celtic elements in the natures of its disciples may have 
contributed to the dreamy, inactive qualities of transcendentalism, it may be 
interesting to speculate ; but it can hardly be more. To adopt a suggested 
explanation of the movement, and call it a sporadic outcropping of Celticism, 
would be wildly contrary to the evidence. 



196 

taking place at a definite time, in specially fertilized soil, under 
particular conditions. 

In this connection, as we have already hinted, we must not 
minimize the importance of the connection of transcenden- 
talism with literary romanticism 1 — indeed with the literary 
spirit in the widest sense — nor forget that its literary ingre- 
dients, though obviously less significant than its moral and 
philosophical, must by no means be neglected. Transcenden- 
talism was in part a literary renaissance. These men awoke 
suddenly from the narrow culture of New England and be- 
held, spread out before them in bewildering richness, a whole 
world of literature. Are we in a position to realize the feelings 
that sight must have aroused? It must have corneas the first 
glimpse of Homer came to Keats — only with them it was not 
one new planet, but a whole constellation, a whole firmament, 
that burst upon their view; it was not one Pacific, but a 
hundred, whose mysteries allured them. (And critics carp at 
these men because their scholarship was not minutely accu- 
rate!) But, great as it was, we must not overemphasize the 
relative importance of this element in transcendentalism. The 
movement obtained its fullest objective expression, to be sure, 
in a literary enterprise, the Dial, a journal whose sub-title, 
" A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion," ex- 
plains its scope. Yet even in the Dial the philosophical and 
religious elements constantly tended to overbalance the literary 
(spoiling much of the poetry, it might be incidentally re- 
marked). If these things be true, Emerson's relation to his 
age, then, may be taken as typically transcendental : he was a 
poet and literary man appealing to the sense of beauty; he 
was still more a teacher appealing to the love of truth; but 
doubtless even more than poet or philosopher, he was the 
prophet and preacher appealing to the will, to the moral and 
religious nature of man. So, too, transcendentalism: it was 
a literary movement, a philosophy, and a religion, all in one.. 
There is a Platonic fitness in the triple relation. 

1 Such facts as the Elizabethan revival and the intensified love of nature 
are simply two typical examples of the similarities between the two move- 
ments. 



197 

It is clear, also, that had the facilities for the study of the 
other arts been as great as those for the study of literature, 
they would have assumed a much more conspicuous place than 
they did in the New England renaissance. Even as it is, the 
new interest aroused in music, and the influence, especially, of 
Beethoven are far from negligible. 

Of the many things that have been written about transcen- 
dentalism, Matthew Arnold's essay on Emerson contains, 
assuredly, some of the most keenly critical and at the same 
time some of the most sympathetically appreciative — for not 
a little of what Arnold writes especially of Emerson applies 
without important qualification to these other transcendental- 
ists. Says Arnold, " by his conviction that in the life of the 
spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit 
will come more and more to be sanely understood, and to pre- 
vail, and to work for happiness, — by this conviction and hope 
Emerson was great, and he will surely prove in the end to 
have been right in them." Emerson, to be sure, was a genius 
in a sense in which none of the rest of this group 1 were, and 
if all of them were not full sharers of the " hopeful, serene, 
beautiful temper " of that genius, yet there was not one but 
had a portion of it, and each too was in his degree " the friend 
and aider of those who would live in the spirit " — a phrase 
which sums up, with the rarest insight, the positive and last- 
ing achievement of transcendentalism. 

And Arnold suggests a reason why many have failed to 
judge this movement soundly : " Emerson's points are in them- 
selves true, if understood in a certain high sense ; they are true 
and fruitful. And the right work to be done at the hour when 
he appeared was to affirm them generally and absolutely. . . . 
The time might come for doing other work later, but the work 
which Emerson did was the right work to be done then." 
This is in reality simply an appeal — not frequent in Arnold — 
for an historical judgment. To the attempt to judge trans- 
cendentalism absolutely, without taking into account the pecu- 

1 We refer, of course, to those we have been discussing, not including 
Thoreau therefore. 



198 

liar conditions of the time when it appeared, may be attributed, 
we imagine, a majority of the one-sided and misleading esti- 
mates of its nature. To be to unawakened earth the trumpet 
of a prophecy 1 — this was the wish of the transcendentalists. 
To be judged as philosophers who offered one more solution 
of the riddle of existence — this has too often been their des- 
tiny. As philosophers, inevitably, they failed — transcendental- 
ism, which averts its ken from half of human fate, is no un- 
ravelling of the master-knot. But as inspirers of their gen- 
eration, they succeeded. He, therefore, who has a wish to 
understand this movement aright must endeavor to put him- 
self back in the Massachusetts of 1835. Hard enough, even 
then, will it be for him to appreciate the glow at the hearts 
of those who watched this renaissance of feeling dawn over 
New England, at the hearts of the men and women who 
awoke to perceive that " the sun shines today also." 

Youthful — that is exactly what this movement was. It had 
the hope and the imagination and the passion of youth ; it had, 
too, youth's extravagance, its impatience with detail, its over- 
confidence in its own powers. Characteristics like these, it is 
true, even among those still immature, may justly bring a 
smile to the lips of experience and age, but that experience 
would little deserve its name which should blame the young 
for possessing those very qualities that constitute the youthful 
spirit. Ours, in judging transcendentalism, is the experience 
which the passage of time has brought, and as we look back 
on the men of a generation so strangely different from our 
own, nothing is easier than to fall into a satirical mood: to 
ridicule their amateurish seeking after culture, to point out 
how their vaunted wisdom only exposed their ignorance, how 
their boasted cosmopolitanism only revealed their provincial 
limitations, to call them sciolists and dabblers and to moralize 
on the disastrous results of their inaccurate and disorderly 
habits of thinking or their wild notions of the function of 
books, habits and notions which have been described — and not 

" I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily 
as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my 
neighbors up." — Thoreau, Walden. 



199 

with entire injustice — by the phrase " literary Epicureanism/* 
Smile, we must. But if we smile cynically rather than kindly, 
if we fail to perceive that many of these qualities were what 
constituted the very essence of the age and were themselves 
instrumental in imparting to it, and to the age that followed, 
high purposes and hopes — how much wiser shall we prove 
ourselves than the man to whom experience and the passing 
years have brought only intolerance for the extravagance of 
early life? For — let it be carefully noted — it is extravagance 
and excess, essential qualities of youth, not moral obliquity, 
its frequent but inessential attendant, whose counterpart we 
find among the leading transcendentalists. Idealism run mad, 
individualism run mad, though there were suggestions of even 
these extremes in the youthful spirit of these men, it was, 
after all, a spirit tempered with moral sanity and productive 
not merely of aspirations but of deeds. Whence these con- 
trasted elements were derived, we have already seen, but in 
the light of our present analogy, it is worth while again to call 
to mind their sources. The grandsire of transcendentalism 
was the French Revolution ; its mother was a mystical philoso- 
phy ; its father was the Puritan spirit — rapture and revolution 
were in its veins, but because moral integrity was in those 
veins as well, it was preserved, in the main, from those roman- 
tic and anarchical excesses to which, in the case of not a few 
related European movements, rapture and revolution, morally 
unrestrained, had led. Because these transcendentalists 
breathed their ancestral New England air, their footsteps were 
kept steady, nor did they wander into that abyss of decadence 
and moral death along whose brink the narrow and danger- 
ous path of mysticism has been proved, a thousand times, to 
lie. It is this moral element which redeems transcendentalism 
and puts in a different light its bewildering exaggerations. 
Had its apostles uttered their extreme statements simply as 
philosophers, had it been as mere theorists that they put their 
disproportionate emphasis on the ideal side of life, we should 
feel less disposed to judge them mildly; but because they 
uttered those statements and put that emphasis as prophets 



200 

and preachers, and exemplified their doctrines in pure and 
noble lives, we can almost applaud their very exaggerations. 1 

That there were men and women in New England at this 
time who were affected by these same ideal and revolutionary 
influences, but who lacked the moral balance of the Puritan 
character, it would be venturing little to assume. That such 
actually did exist the records of the period amply prove. And 
does not this suggest — here at the end of our inquiry — that 
the seemingly arbitrary limitation which we placed upon our- 
selves at the beginning corresponds, roughly at least, to a real 
distinction? While it may be impossible to draw a sharply 
distinguishing line between the two, surely it is not fanciful 
to perceive a real difference in kind between transcendentalists 
of the type of Emerson or Parker and men who, having many 
or all of the other elements of transcendentalism, lack the 
Puritan character. 

To which of these two groups the term " transcendental- 
ists " may be more properly applied is, perhaps, an open ques- 
tion. Possibly it would be more in accord with popular usage 
to reserve it for the latter, falling in with a prevalent tendency 
to attach the epithet transcendental to a man in proportion as 
his nature loses all balance and he himself evaporates in a 
cloud of ideal vapor. We have not chosen to do so. The 
way, however, in which the word is to be used is after all a 
minor matter, provided the distinction itself be clearly grasped 
and the confusion between two profoundly different types be 
thus prevented, provided, that is, we do not lump promiscu- 
ously together every mad " come-outer " and " apostle of the 
newness " on the one hand and on the other men whose vis- 
ionary and anti-social tendencies were corrected by the healthi- 
ness of their moral natures. And some of these same con- 
siderations, in a very different way, must be kept in mind in 
any attempt to estimate men who trace their spiritual lineage 
to Emerson and his circle. Walt Whitman, for instance, is a 

1 " I desire to speak somewhere without bounds ; like a man in a waking 
moment, to men in their waking moments ; for I am convinced that I cannot 
exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression." — 
Thoreau. Walden. 



201 

mystic and a revolutionist, and the immediate source, too, of 
his main conceptions is apparent; but his is not the Puritan 
spirit, and to him must be denied — in our sense — the name 
of transcendentalist. Much more must it be denied to lesser 
men who, imbibing somewhat of the individualism and ideal- 
ism of their masters, have not been equally careful to imitate 
their character. Were Emerson alive today he would doubt- 
less fail to recognize many who claim to be his legitimate 
offspring. 

What harmful effects transcendental doctrines may have 
had in natures of this sort 1 — natures that lacked the proper 
moral balance — it is not our part, if indeed it were within our 
power, to trace. But to the benefits which have flowed from 
the teaching and example of the transcendentalists we fortu- 
nately have ample witness. The influence of Emerson on such 
men as Arnold and Tyndall, men so unlike Emerson in many 
ways and in many ways so unlike each other, is typical of the 
inspiration which this movement spread abroad. Many a 
tribute has attested this ; and there is no more fitting way than 
with one of these to conclude what we have had to say of 
New England transcendentalism: 

"... in a copy of Mrs. Jameson's Italian Painters, against 
a passage describing Correggio as a true servant of God in his 
art, above sordid ambition, devoted to truth, ' one of those 
superior beings of whom there are so few ; ' Margaret [Fuller] 
wrote on the margin, ' And yet all might be such.' The book 
lay long on the table of the owner, in Florence, and chanced 
to be read there by a young artist of much talent. ' These 
words,' said he, months afterwards, ' struck out a new strength 
in me. They revived resolutions, long fallen away, and made 
me set my face like flint.' " 

1 See T. W. Higginson, The Sunny Side of the Transcendental Period, 
Atlantic Monthly, xciii, n. Reprinted in Part of a Man's Life, 1905. 



APPENDIX 

German Literature in New England in the Early Part 
of the Nineteenth Century 

A passage from the Life, Letters, and Journals of George 
Ticknor (vol. i, p. n) shows clearly the lack of interest in 
things German, in the New England of the middle of the sec- 
ond decade of the nineteenth century. Ticknor, on deciding 
to go to Gottingen to study, made an attempt before leaving 
home to learn something of the German language. The fol- 
lowing, telling of the difficulties he encountered, has reference 
to the summer and autumn of 1814 (he sailed in May, 181 5) : 

" At Jamaica Plains there was a Dr. Brosius, a native of 
Strasburg, who gave instruction in mathematics. He was 
willing to do what he could for me in German, but he warned 
me that his pronunciation was very bad, as was that of all 
Alsace, which had become a part of France. Nor was it pos- 
sible to get books. I borrowed a Meidinger's Grammar, 
French and German, from my friend, Mr. Everett, and sent 
to New Hampshire, where I knew there was a German Dic- 
tionary, and procured it. I also obtained a copy of Goethe's 
' Werther ' in German (through Mr. William S. Shaw's con- 
nivance) from amongst Mr. J. Q. Adams' books, deposited by 
him, on going to Europe, in the Athenaeum, under Mr. Shaw's 
care, but without giving him permission to use them. I got 
so far as to write a translation of ' Werther,' but no farther." 

The inevitable inference from this passage, that German 
books were exceedingly scarce in New England about 181 5, 
is confirmed by the booksellers' auction catalogs of the time, 
which contain only very infrequently any German works. An 
unusual number of German entries is found in the catalog of / 
a sale occurring in Boston, December 20, 1815: "Goethe's 
Works, German, 4 vols. ; Sorrows of Werther. Jacobi, Works, 
German, 3 vols. Mendelssohn, Philosophical Works. Les- 

202 



203 

sing, Dramatic Works, 2 vols. Schiller, History of the Thirty 
Years' War, German; Conspiracy of Fiesco." At a sale of 
the library of Rev. Samuel Cooper Thacher, Boston, June 18, 
1818, we find : " Goethe, 1 vol., including ' Die Wahlverwandt- 
schaften.' " At another auction two months later : " Elements 
of the Critical Philosophy, London, 1798." In connection 
with Ticknor's remark about the German dictionary in New 
Hampshire, it is interesting to note that in 1824 the Library 
of the Philological Society of Middlebury College, Vermont, 
contained Schiller's works, complete in eighteen volumes, and 
twenty volumes of Goethe. 

It was especially, as was stated in Chapter L, the return, 
about 1819, of several young American students from Got- 
tingen that stimulated New England interest in German litera- 
ture and German educational methods. " From 181 5 to 1817 
Everett, Ticknor and Cogswell were studying in Germany and 
meeting many German scholars and literary men, whose inter- 
est in Harvard College they aroused, so that in the next two 
years following books were received by the College Library 
from Eichhorn, Blumenbach, Schaeffer, Wolf, Hermann, 
Jacobs, and Kastner ; also from Spohn, Spitzner, Bouterwek, 
van der Kemp, Glasenwald, the Grimm brothers, and Goethe." 1 
(An exhaustive account, by Mr. L. L. Mackall, of Goethe's 
gift to Harvard and the circumstances attending it was pub- 
lished in the Goethe Jahrbuch for 1904.) " When Everett 
went abroad, he was given $500 by the Harvard Corporation 
to spend in Germany, and a few months later $500 more for 
the same purpose." 2 The coming of Charles Follen to Har- 
vard as instructor in German about 1825 also did much to 
increase enthusiasm for things German, and what had been 
accomplished in this direction in a decade or a little more is 
indicated by a glance at the Catalogue of Books in the Boston 
Athen<eum, Boston, 1827, and A Catalogue of the Library of 
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cambridge, 
1830. To the former the following " Advertisement " was 
prefixed : 

1 From a letter to the writer from Mr. William C. Lane, Librarian of 
Harvard University. 

2 From the same letter referred to in note i. 



204 

" Several thousand volumes of Books were ordered for the 
Athenaeum during the last summer. As none of them are 
rare, or difficult to be procured, they will no doubt soon be 
received ; and it has, therefore, been thought best to insert 
their titles in this Catalogue. They can easily be distin- 
guished, because no number of a shelf is attached to them, 
and no note of the time or place where they were printed." 

A large number of these books were German and included : 
Goethe — Sammtliche Werke; Herder — Sammtliche theolog- 
ische, historiche, und literarische Schriften; Jacobi — Werke; 
Lessing — Sammtliche Werke; Novalis — Schriften; Richter — 
Domstiicke, Vorschule der Aesthetik, Titan, Levana ; Schiller — 
Sammtliche Werke; Schlegel, A. W. — Dramatische Kunst, 
Lectures on Dramatic Literature (translated), Gedichte; 
Schlegel, Fried. — Geschichte der Literatur der Griechen; 
Tieck — Sammtliche Werke; Uhland — Schriften; Wieland — 
Sammtliche Werke. German works and translations from the 
German actually in the Athenaeum at the time when the cata- 
log of 1827 was published included: Goethe — The Sorrows of 
Werther, tr. from the G., Chiswick, 1822; Herder — On Man, 
tr. from the G., London, 1803; Schiller — History of the 
Thirty Years' War, tr. from the G., vol. I, Dublin, 1800, — Don 
Carlos, a Tragedy, London, 1798; Schlegel, Fried. — Lectures 
on the History of Literature, from the G., 2 vols., Phil., 1818; 
Wieland — Oberon, a Poem, tr. from the G., London, 1805, — 
the same, Boston, 18 10. 

The Harvard Library in 1830 was (actually) much richer / 

in German works than the Athenaeum was in 1827. Among 
others we find : 

Goethe. Werke, 20 Bande, Stuttgard und Tubingen, 181 5- 
1819. Nine other entries. 

Herder. Ten entries, originals and translations. 

Kant. Critik der reinen Vernunst, Riga, 1790. Critik der 
practischen Vernunst, Riga, 1792. Critik der Urteils- 
craft, Berlin, 1793. Elements of the Critical Philosophy, 
London, 1798. Four other entries. 

Lessing. Fragmente und Antifragmente, Niirnberg, 1788. 

Lessing und J. J. Eschenburg. Zur Geschichte und Littera- 
tur, 3 Bande, Berlin und Braunschweig, 1 781-1793. 



205 

Schiller. Werke, 18 Bande, Carlsruhe, 1817. Wallenstein, 

translated by Coleridge, London, 1800. 
Schlegel, A. W. Ueber Dramatische Kunst und Litteratur, 
3 Bande, Heidelberg, 1809-11. Course of Lectures on 
Dramatic Art and Literature, tr. from the G., London, 
1815. 
Schlegel, Fried. Geschichte der alten und neuen Litteratur, 
Wien, 1815. Lectures on the History of Literature, from 
the G., Phil., 1818. 
Schleiermacher. Six entries, including five volumes of his 

translation of Plato. 
The accession books of the Harvard Library contain these 
two entries: 

" June 18, 1830. Three boxes of Books, German mostly." 
" September 21, 1831. One box of German Books." 
No detailed entry is given under the former head, but acces- 
sion dates in the books of the Library show that these " three 
boxes " of 1830 must have contained among other things : 
Lessing — Sammtliche Werke, Berlin, 1825 ; Kant — Vermischte 
Schriften; Jacobi — Werke; Wieland — Sammtliche Werke, 
Leipzig, 1818. Under the second head detailed entries are 
made. The list includes a few volumes of Kant, Fichte, and 
Schelling, but the two largest sets are the complete works of 
Muller (27 vols.) and of Herder (45 vols, in 41). 

Auctioneers' catalogs of the latter part of the fourth decade 
of the century show, by comparison with those referred to 
above, how widely interest in things German had developed 
in twenty years. For example, in a catalog of books, the 
stock of S. Bardett, a bookseller, sold at auction in Boston, 
November 11, 1837, the entries are numbered according to 
languages as follows: 

English, Greek, and Latin, 1-77. 
Spanish, 78-231. 
German, 232-480. 
Italian, 481-651. 
French, 652-1032. 
The German entries include Richter, Herder (63 vols, in 22), 
and especially a large number of editions of Goethe and 



206 

Schiller, both broken and complete. The German entries in 
a sale at Boston, June 21, 1838, extended from 2262 to 2429, 
and include Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Lessing. 

Among the early private libraries in New England contain- 
ing many German books were those of F. H. Hedge, Convers 
Francis, and George Ripley. A list of some of the most 
important works in the collection of Ripley will be found in 
Frothingham's biography of Ripley, page 46. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following bibliography makes no attempt to include the 
numerous essays and magazine articles, mainly of a critical 
nature, which have been consulted, nor the large number of 
works, biographies, etc., of men indirectly connected with New 
England transcendentalism, such as, for instance, Kant, Cole- 
ridge, and Carlyle. It omits also histories of literature (ex- 
cept American literature) and philosophy, as well as works of 
the type of Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eigh- 
teenth Century. 

For the sake of convenience, magazines are included in a 
list by themselves. 

Aikin, Lucy. Memoirs, Miscellanies, and Letters of the late 
Lucy Aikin. London, 1864. 

and Charming, William Ellery. Correspondence from 

1 826-1 842. Ed. by A. L. LeBreton. London, 1874. 
Alcott, Amos Bronson. Concord Days. Boston, 1872. 

Conversations with Children on the Gospels. 2 vols. Bos- 
ton, 1836-37. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson ; an Estimate of his Character and 

Genius. Boston, 1888. 
Table-talk. Boston, 1877. 
Tablets. Boston, 1879. 
Alcott, Louisa May. ,Life, Letters, and Journals. Ed. by 
Mrs. E. D. Cheney. Boston, 1889. 
Silver Pitchers, and Other Stories. (Containing " Trans- 
cendental Wild Oats.") Boston, 1902. 
Allen, A. V. G. Jonathan Edwards. Boston, 1889. 
Bartol, C. A. Amos Bronson Alcott; his Character; a Ser- 
mon. Boston, 1888. 
Brooks, C. T. William Ellery Channing, a Centennial Biog- 
raphy. Boston, 1880. 

207 



208 

Brownson, H. F. Orestes A. Brownson's Life. 3 vols. 
Detroit, 1 898-1 900. 

Brownson, Orestes Augustus. Works: Collected and Ar- 
ranged by H. F. Brownson. 20 vols. Detroit, 1882- 
1887. (See especially vi, 1-134.) 
Charles Elwood; or, The Infidel Converted. Boston, 1840. 
(Reprinted in Works, iv, 173.) 

Cabot, J. E. Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2 vols. 
Boston, 1887. 

Cary, Elizabeth Luther. Emerson, Poet and Thinker. New 
York, 1904. 

Chadwick, J. W. Theodore Parker, Preacher and Reformer. 
Boston, 1900. 
William Ellery Channing, Minister of Religion. Boston, 
1903. 

Channing, William Ellery. Works, Fourteenth Complete 
Edition, with an Introduction. Six vols, in three. Bos- 
ton, 1855. 

Channing, William Henry. The Life of William Ellery 
Channing, D.D. The Centenary Memorial Edition, by 
His Nephew. Boston, 1899. 

Cheney, Mrs. E. D. Reminiscences. Boston, 1902. 

Clarke, James Freeman. Autobiography, Diary, and Corre- 
spondence. Ed. by E. E. Hale. Boston, 1891. 
Memorial and Biographical Sketches. Boston, 1878. 

Cobbe, Frances Power. Life; by herself. Boston, 1894. 

Conway, M. D. Emerson, at Home and Abroad. Boston, 
1882. 

Cooke, George Willis. Ralph Waldo Emerson; his Life, 
Writings, and Philosophy. Boston, 1881. 
The Poets of Transcendentalism ; an Anthology ; with in- 
troductory essay and biographical notes. Boston, 1903. 
Unitarianism in America ; a History of its Origin and De- 
velopment. Boston, 1902. 

Dall, Caroline Healey. Margaret and Her Friends, or Ten 
Conversations with Margaret Fuller. Boston, 1895. 

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of President Edwards. 4 
vols. New York, 1857. 



209 

Ellis, George E. A Half-Century of the Unitarian Contro- 
versy. Boston, 1857. 
Emerson, Edward Waldo. Emerson in Concord ; a Memoir. 

Boston, 1889. 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Works, Riverside Edition. 12 
vols. Boston, 1883-1894. 
Complete Works of Emerson, Centenary Edition. 12 vols. 

Boston, 1 903-1 904. 
A Correspondence between John Stirling and Ralph 
Waldo Emerson. Ed. by Edward Waldo Emerson. 
Boston, 1897. 
Carlyle, Thomas, and Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Corre- 
spondence, 1834-1872. Ed. by Charles Eliot Norton. 
2 vols. Boston, 1886. 
Emerson, R. W., and Grimm, H. F. Correspondence. 

Ed. by T. W. Holls. Boston, 1903. 
Letters to a Friend, 1838-1853. Ed. by C. E. Norton. 

Boston, 1899. 
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, by R. W. Emerson, 
W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke. 2 vols. Boston, 
1874. 
Parnassus. Boston, 1875. 
Fuller, Margaret. See Ossoli. 

Frothingham, Octavius Brooks. Boston Unitarian ism, 1820- 
1850; the Life and Work of Nathaniel Langdon Froth- 
ingham. New York, 1890. 
George . Ripley (American Men of Letters). Boston, 

1882. 
Memoir of William Henry Channing. Boston, 1886. 
Theodore Parker; a Biography. Boston, 1874. 
Transcendentalism in New England, a History. New 
York, 1876. 
Garnett, Richard. Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. London, 

1888. 
Hale, Edward Everett. Ralph Waldo Emerson; with two 

early essays of Emerson. Boston, 1902. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Blithedale Romance. Boston, 1895. 
15 



210 

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Cheerful Yesterdays. 
Boston, 1898. 
Contemporaries. Boston, 1899. 

Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Amercan Men of Letters). Bos- 
ton, 1884. 
Old Cambridge. New York, 1899. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Ralph Waldo Emerson (Ameri- 
can Men of Letters). Boston, 1885. 
Howe, Julia Ward. Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli). 

Boston, 1883. 
Ireland, Alexander. Recollections of Emerson. Boston, 

1903. 
Judd, Sylvester. Margaret, a Tale of the Real and the Ideal. 

Boston, 1846. 
Lee, Eliza Buckminster. Memoirs of Rev. Joseph Buck- 
minster, D.D., and of his son, Rev. Joseph Stevens 
Buckminster. Boston, 1849. 
Mead, E. D. The Influence of Emerson. Boston, 1903. 
Nichol, John. American Literature. Edinburg, 1882. 
Norton, Andrews. A Discourse on the Latest Form of In- 
fidelity. Cambridge, 1839. 
Ossoli, Sarah Margaret (Fuller), Marchesa d\ At Home 
and Abroad. Boston, 1874. 
Life Without and Life Within. Boston, 1890. 
Love-Letters, 1845-1846; with an introduction by J, W. 

Howe. New York, 1903. 
Papers on Literature and Art. London, 1846. 
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston, 1844. 
Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Kindred Papers, 
etc. Boston, 1855. 
Parker, Theodore. The Critical and Miscellaneous Writings 
of Theodore Parker. Boston, 1843. 
Speeches, Addresses and Occasional Sermons by Theo- 
dore Parker. 2 vols. Boston, 1852. 
An Humble Tribute to the Memory of W. E. Channing; 

a Sermon preached Oct. 9, 1842. Boston, 1842. 
Transcendentalism; a Lecture. Boston, 1876. 
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer. Record of Mr. Alcott's School. 
Boston, 1874. 



211 

Reminiscences of William Ellery Channing. Boston, 

1880. 
Quincy, Josiah. History of the Boston Athenaeum. Cam- 
bridge, 185 1. 
Renan, Ernest, fitudes D'Histoire Religieuse. Paris, 1864. 
Richardson, C. F. American Literature, 1 607-1 885. 2 vols. 

New York, 1887-1889. 
Ripley, George. " The Latest Form of Infidelity " Ex- 
amined ; a letter to Andrews Norton. Boston, 1839. 
Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature; edited by 

George Ripley. 14 vols. Boston, 1838. 
Salt, H. S. Life of Henry David Thoreau. London, 1890. 
Sanborn, Frank B., and Harris, W. T. A. Bronson Alcott : 

His Life and Philosophy. 2 vols. Boston, 1893. (The 

life of Alcott is by Mr. Sanborn ; the essay on Alcott's 

philosophy, by Mr. Harris.) 
Sanborn, Frank B. Henry D. Thoreau (American Men of 

Letters). Boston, 1882. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston, 1901. 
The Genius and Character of Emerson; Lectures at the 

Concord School of Philosophy (1884). Ed. by F. B. 

Sanborn. Boston, 1885. / -A *f 

The Personality of Emerson. Boston, 1903. /'^ ^ } 

The Personality of Thoreau. Boston, 1901. jf 1 - 

Swift, Lindsay. Brook Farm; its Members, Scholars, and 

Visitors. New York, 1900. 
Thoreau, Henry David, Writings, Riverside Edition, 11 

vols. Boston, 1 895-1 898. 
Ticknor, George. Life, Letters, and Journals of George 

Ticknor. 2 vols. Boston, 1877. 
Trent, William P. A History of American Literature, 1607- 

1865. New York, 1903. 
Walker, Williston. A History of the Congregational 

Churches in the United States. New York, 1894. 
Wendell, Barrett. A Literary History of America. New 

York, 1900. 
Weiss, John. Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker. 

2 vols. New York, 1864. 



212 

Winsor, Justin. The Memorial History of Boston. Ed. by 
Justin Winsor. Vol. iii. Boston, 1881. 

Woodbury, C. J. Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson. New 
York, 1890. 

Magazines 

Biblical Repertory; Biblical Repertory and Theological Re- 
view; Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review; Pres- 
byterian Quarterly and Princeton Review, Various 
Places, 1825-71. 

Biblical Repository, Quarterly. Andover and New York, 
1831-1850. 

Boston Quarterly Review. Ed. by O. A. Brownson. Boston, 
1838-1842. (Merged in the Democratic Review.) 

Brownson's Quarterly Review. Boston and New York, 1844- 

1875. 

Christian Disciple (1813-1818), and Christian Disciple and 
Theological Review (1819-1823). Boston, 1813-1823. 
(Continued as Christian Examiner.) 

Christian Examiner. Boston, 1824-1869. 

The Dial; a Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Reli- 
gion. 1 Boston and London, 1 841-1844. 

The Harbinger, devoted to Social and Political Progress. 
Published by the Brook Farm Phalanx. New York 
and Boston, 1 845-1 849. 

The Massachusetts Quarterly Review. Boston, 1848-1850. 

Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. Boston, 1804-1810. 

North American Review. Boston, 181 5- 

Bibliographies will be found in Garnett's life of Emerson, 
in Sanborn's life of Emerson, in Chadwick's life of Parker, 
in Higginson's life of Margaret Fuller, and in Lindsay Swift's 
Brook Farm. 

1 The Dial has been reprinted by The Rowfant Club of Cleveland. Cleve- 
land, 1 900-1 903. See also George Willis Cooke, An Historical and Bio- 
graphical Introduction to accompany the Dial as reprinted in Numbers for 
The Rowfant Club, 2 Vols. Cleveland, 1902. 



INDEX. 

(This index does not include the material in the appendix.) 



Abolition, 150-151, 154, 163-164, 
172-173 

Abolitionists, The (Channing), 150 

Aeschylus, 84, 86 

Aids to Reflection, 2, 58 

Alcott, A. Bronson, life, 52, note ; 
ancestry and early training, 52- 
55 ; intellectual and literary in- 
fluences affecting, 55-62; Con- 
versations with Children on the 
Gospels, 115, 1 1 7-1 18; literary 
style, 118; mysticism, 129-131 ; 
" transcendental pride," 140-141 ; 
philosophy of evil, 143 ; relation 
to practical life, 1 52-1 61 ; Temple 
School, and educational theories, 
152-154; financial troubles of Al- 
cott family, 156-158 

Alcott, Louisa May, 157-159 

Alcott, Mrs. Bronson, 156-158 

Alfieri, 95, 99 

American Scholar, The, 34, 68, 142 

Andover Theological Seminary, 23 

Annexation of Texas (Channing), 
150 

Anthology Club, 23 

Arianism, 20 

Ariosto, 94, 99 

Aristophanes, 86 

Aristotle, 56, 61, 87 

Arminianism, 19, 104 

Arnold, Matthew, 134, 169, 197, 201 

Augustine, St., 61, 66 

Bacon, Francis, 61, 66, 78, 87, 96, 

98 
Bancroft, George, 31, 36 
Barrow, Isaac, 88 
Bartol, Cyrus A., 36 
Beck, Dr. Charles, 31 
Beecher, Dr. Lyman, 84 
Beethoven, 128, 197 
Belsham, Thomas, 104 



Bentham, 56 

Ber anger, 97 

Berkeley, 45, 60, 66, 80, 88 

Berni, 95 

Bhagavad Gita, 61, 73 

Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 

50, 58 
Bion, 86 

Boehme, 59, 60, 72, 127 
Boethius, 57 

Books (Emerson), 68, 126 
Brahma, 73, 126 
Brisbane, Albert, 38 
Brook Farm, 7, 11, 38-39, 105, 194 
Brook Farm (L. Swift), 11 
Brown, John, 163, 173 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 78, 98 
Brownson, Orestes A., 36, 38 
Brownson's Quarterly Review, 36 
Buckminster, Rev. Joseph, 27 
Buckminster, Rev. Joseph Stevens, 

27 
Bulwer-Lytton, 56, 86 
Bunyan, 127 
Burke, 185 

" Burns Affair," 154, 163 
Burton, Robert, 78 
Butler, Bishop, 48, 88 
Byron, 65, 86, 164 

Calvinism, 28, 44, 63, 92, 146, 184 

Carlyle, 24, 50, 56, 61, 75, 96, 98, 
105, in, 113, 155, 172, 193 

Cervantes, 94 

Channing, Ellery, 37 

Channing, William Ellery, relation 
to Unitarianism and transcendent- 
alism of, 27-29 ; openness to the 
spirit of the time, 29-30 ; life, 
43, note ; ancestry and early train- 
ing, 43-45 ; intellectual and lit- 
erary influences affecting, 45-52 ; 
influence on Alcott, 57; influence 



213 



214 



on Emerson, 29, 66 ; influence on 
Parker, 84 ; sentimentalism and 
mysticism, 123-125 ; " transcen- 
dental pride," i33- J 34 1 philosophy 
of evil, 143; relation to practi- 
cal life, 149-152; relation to anti- 
slavery movement, 1 50-1 51 

Channing, William Henry, 36, 38 

Character of Socrates, The (Emer- 
son), 66 

Chardon Street Convention, 7 

Chaucer, 78, 98 

Christian Examiner, 33 

Cicero, 86 

Clarke, James Freeman, 24, 85 

Clarke, Samuel, 88 

Coleridge, 2, 24, 33, 49, 50, 56, 57, 
61, 65, 74, 80, 84, 86, 96, 106, no 

Combe, George, 105 

Concord Days, 117, 140 

Concord School of Philosophy, 141 

"Conversations," 40, 115, 154 

Conversations with Children on the 
Gospels, 115, 152, 153 

Cousin, 34, 50, 77, 84, 86, 88, 106, 
in 

Cowper, 56 

Cranch, Christopher P., 36, 37, 38 

Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 
(Carlyle), 34, 95 

Critique of Practical Reason, 5, 89, 
123 

Critique of Pure Reason, 1, 3, 5 

Cudworth, Ralph, 70, 88 

Curtis, George William, 38 

Dana, Charles A., 38 

Dante, 86, 98, 99, 129 

Darwin, 79 

" Dedham Case," 23 

Demosthenes, 84 

Descartes, 86, 87 

De Wette, 86, 99 

Dial, 36-37, 73, 105, 113, 155, 196 

Dickens, 78, 105 

Divinity School Address, 34, 89, 

174 
Don Quixote, 78 
Dwight, John S., 38 



Edgeworth, Maria, 56 

Edwards, Jonathan, 20, 48, 83, 195 

Eighteenth Century, relation to 
transcendentalism of, 13-18 

Elizabethan Dramatists, 78, 95, 98 

Emerson, E. W., 171 

Emerson in Concord, 171 

Emerson, Mary Moody, 63 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, life, 62, 
note; ancestry and early training, 
62-64 ; intellectual and literary 
influences affecting, 64-81 ; au- 
thorities quoted by, 79-80 ; ac- 
count of "the times" by, 104- 
105; mysticism, 126-128; "trans- 
cendental pride," 134-135 ; phi- 
losophy of evil, 144 ; relation to 
practical life, 166-176; relation 
to anti-slavery movement, 163- 
164 

Emerson, Rev. William, 23 

Epictetus, 94 

Evelyn, John, 61 

Everett, Edward, 31, 65, 104 

Evil of Sin, The (Channing), 143 

Excursion, The, 49, 74 

Faust, 17, 98 

Federalism in New England, 24 

Ferguson, Adam, 45 

Fichte, 51, 86, 102, 186 

Follen, Charles T., 31, 36, 76 

Fourier, 105 

Fox, George, 56, 78, 127 

Francis, Rev. Convers, 86 

Franklin, 95 

Freedom of the Will, The, 20 

Freeman, Rev. James, 22 

French Revolution, 16, 185-186 

Friend, The, 49, 58, 74, 96 

Frothingham, N. L., 105 

Frothingham, O. B., 10 

" Fruitlands," 39, 155-156 

Fugitive Slave Law, 173 

Fuller, Sarah Margaret, life, 91, 
note ; ancestry and early training, 
91-93 ; intellectual and literary 
influences affecting, 93-104 ; " con- 
versations," 40, 1 1 5-1 17; senti- 
mentalism and mysticism, 128- 



215 



129; "transcendental pride," 135- 
140; philosophy of evil, 144; re- 
lation to practical life, 176-180 
Fuller, Thomas, 61 

Glanvill, Joseph, 61 

Godwin, William, 47, 95 

Goethe, 51, 61, 68, 75, 76, 77, 79, 86, 
96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 164, 186 

" Great Awakening," 20 

Greeley, Horace, 38, 138, 139, 179 

Growth of the Mind, The (Samp- 
son Reed), 52, 72 

Guyon, Madame, 127 

Hafiz, 73 

Harbinger, The, 39 

Harris, William T., 129 

Hartley, 104 

Harvard College, 24 

Hawthorne, 36, 38 

Hazlitt, Rev. William, 22 

Hazlitt, William, 149, 151 

Hedge, Rev. F. H., 33, 35, 36, 75, 

160 
Hegel, 17, 77, 87, 105 
Heine, 99 
Helvetius, 94 
Heraclitus, 187 
Herder, 51, 99 
Herodotus, 86 
Herrick, Robert, 61 
Hesiod, 57 
Higginson, T. W., 11, 139, 141, 163, 

176 
Historic Notes of Life and Letters 

in Nezu England, 104 
Hobbes, 88 
Homer, 84, 86 
Hume, 13, 45, 66, 88 
Hunter, John, 79 
Hutcheson, Francis, 45 

Intimations of Immortality, Ode 
on, 61, 74, 152 

Jacobi, 61, 86, 102 
Jamblicus, 59, 60, 72 
James, William, 120-121 
Jefferson, 95 



Jouffroy, 34, 46, in 
Journal des Debats, 151 

Kant, 1-3, 5, 17, 5i, 77, 87, 88, 123 

King's Chapel, 22 

Kingsley, Charles, 78 

Klopstock, 86 

Koran, 73 

Korner, 98 

Lamb, 24 

Landor, 75 

Lane, Charles, 38, 155 

Latest Form of Infidelity, The, 34 

Law, William, 48, 56, 61 

Lessing, 99 

Lieber, Francis, 31 

Life of Jesus (Strauss), 106 

Likeness to God (Channing), 28 

Literary Remains (Coleridge), 96 

Locke, 2, 3, 45, 56, 66, 88, 95 

Longfellow, 138, 194 

Lovejoy, Owen, 150, 172 

Lowell, J. R. 37, 194 

Lyell, Sir Charles, 79 

Macaulay, 24 

Mackintosh, Sir James, 56, 96 

Manzoni, 99 

Margaret and her Friends, 11 5-1 17 

Mariana (M. Fuller), 128 

Martineau, Harriet, 172 

Martineau, James, 33, 96 

Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 38 

Mather, Increase, 19 

May, Samuel J., 150 

Method of Nature, The, 126 

Michael Angelo, 129 

Milton, 61, 84, 94 

Moliere, 94, 97, 98 

Montaigne, 61, 65, 68 

Monthly Anthology, 23 

Moore, Thomas, 65 

More, Henry, 61, 86 

Moschus, 86 

Napoleon, 78, 174 
Nature, 33, 119, 126, 170, 185 
North American Review, 65, 95 
Norton, Professor Andrews, 33, 105 
Novalis, 98, 99 



216 



Oken, 105 

Oriental " Scriptures," 73 

Orphic Sayings, 37, 115, 118, 130, 

131 
Ossian, 64 

Ossoli, see Fuller, Margaret 
Over Soul, The, 126 
Ovid, 103 
Owen, Sir Richard, 79 

\ 
Paine, Thomas, 15 
Paley, 88 

Parker, Theodore, life, 81, note; 
ancestry and early training, 81— 
84; intellectual and literary in- 
fluences affecting, 84-91 ; account 
of " the times " by, 105-106 ; 
"transcendental pride," 135; phi- 
losophy of evil, 144; relation to 
practical life, 1 61-166; relation 
to anti-slavery movement, 163-164 
Pascal, 66, 127 

Peabody, Elizabeth, 36, 38, 152, 153 
Peabody, Sophia, 36 
Petrarch, 98, 99 

Phillips, Wendell, 163, 164, 173 
Pilgrim's Progress, The, 55, 56 
Pindar, 86 

Plato, 51, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 70, 71, 
80, 86, 87, 101, in, 129, 141, 187 
Plotinus, 59, 60, 61, 68, 71, 127 
Plutarch, 61, 68, 71, 84 
Politian, 95 
Porphyry, 59, 71, 127 
Prelude, The, 50, 75 
Present State of Ethical Philosophy 

(Emerson), 66 
Price, Richard, 45-46 
Priestley, 21, 45, 104 
Proclus, 61, 72 
Prudence, 175 
Pulci, 95 
Punch, 105 

Puritanism, 183, 188-189 
Pythagoras, 59, 60, 141 

Quakerism, 51, 53, 55 

Racine, 94 
Raphael, 129 



Record of a School, 152 

Reed, Sampson, 51, 72 

Reid, Thomas, 45, 56, 88 

Renan, 151 

Richter, 51, 98, 99 

Ripley, 34, 37, 38, 39, 100, 194 

Rousseau, 47, 97, 98 

Saadi, 73 

Sand, George, 78, 97 

Sartor Resartus, 34, 50, 57, 74, 75, 

76, 96 
Schelling, 51, 77, 80, 87, 105, 186 
Schiller, 51, 76, 86, 96, 98, 99 
Schleiermacher, 76, 77 
Scott, 24, 64, 86 
Shakespeare, 46, 65, 68, 69, 84, 94, 

103, 129 
Shelley, 50, 56, 75, g6, 186 
Slavery (Channing), 150 
Smith, Adam, 56 
Socrates, 59, 127 
Southey, 96 
Sparks, Jared, 27 
Specimens of Foreign Standard 

Literature, 34 
Spinoza, 86, 102 
Stael, Madame de, 46, 50, 51, 94, 

95, 96, 97, in 
Stetson, Caleb, 36 
Stewart, Dugald, 56, 66, 88, 102 
Swedenborg, 59, 60, 72, 80, 104, 127 
Swedenborg (Emerson), 127 
Synesius, 72 

Tasso, 86, 99 

Tasso (Goethe), 100 

Taylor, Jeremy, 66 

Temple School, 152-154 

Tennyson, 96 

Theocritus, 86 

Thomson, James, 55 

Thoreau, 9, note, 36, 37, 40, 159, 

192-193 
Thoughts on Modern Literature, 71 
Thucydides, 86 

Ticknor, George, 24, 31, 65, 194 
Tieck, 98, 99 
Tillotson, John, 66 
Transcendental Club, The, 35 



217 



Transcendentalism, 1-8, 18-41, 106- 
112, 113-114, 145-148, i66-i70j 
180-183, 184-201 

Transcendentalism (Parker), 3, 161 

Transcendentalism in New England, 
a History (Frothingham), 10 

Transcendentalist, The (Emerson), 
2, 166 

Transcendentalists, the leading, 9 
(see also 35-38) ; intellectual and 
literary influences affecting, 106- 
112; absurdities of, 114-120; 
mysticism~af, 120-132; individu- 
alism and "pride" of, 132-143; 
philosophy of evil of, 143-145 ; 
relation to practical life of, 145- 
148, 180-183 ; relation to anti- 
slavery movement of, 1 50-1 51, 
154, 163-164, 172-173 

Transient and Permanent in Christi- 
anity, The (Parker), 34 

Trent, W. P., 25 

Tyndall, 201 



Uhland, 99 

Unitarian Christianity (Channing), 

27 
Unitarianism, 18-28, 31, 184 

Varieties of Religious Experience, 

The, 1 20-1 2 1 
Very, Jones, 36, 114 
Vigny, Alfred de, 97 
Voltaire, 164 

Walden Pond, 40 

Ware, Rev. Henry, 23 

Whitman, Walt, 200 

Wilhelm Meister, 75 

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 47 

Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 

178 
Wordsworth, 24, 49, 50, 61, 65, 74, 

80, 96, 105, in, 118, 152, 186, 193 

Xenophon, 84 
Young, Edward, 55 



218 



VITA 

The author was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, August 
13, 1878. After attending the Worcester Classical High 
School, he entered Amherst College in 1896 and was gradu- 
ated in 1900 with the degree of B.A. During the next two 
years he was instructor in mathematics at Amherst. In the 
fall of 1902 he began the study of English at Columbia Uni- 
versity, taking the degree of M.A. in 1903 and being elected 
University Fellow in English for the following year. While at 
Columbia he took courses in English under Professor Brander 
Matthews, Professor W. P. Trent, and Dr. George Philip 
Krapp ; and in philosophy under Professor Frederick J. E. 
Woodbridge. In 1904 he was appointed instructor in English 
literature in Northwestern University and was made assistant 
professor in 1906. 



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